Grrl Power #1469 – Semi Finals Roster
Events include Unlimited Class Charity, where strangely enough, you can’t win by donating all of your organs. Well, unless you have really top-tier regeneration, maybe. Of course, it seems like a terrible idea for someone with massive regeneration to donate an organ, because how would you stop that organ from regenerating the rest of its original body around it, since you’ve implanted it in a place where it’s being kept alive and fed a stream of nutrients? Obviously it would depend on how the regeneration works. Something that required conscious effort would probably be fine, but Wolverine donating half of his liver would probably have dire consequences.
- Unlimited Class Paying it Forward (I’m actually not sure how that would be an event. Maybe it’s some sort of… relay?)
- Unlimited Class Teaching a Man to Fish
- Unlimited Class Condolences
- Unlimited Class Writing Something Meaningful on a Work Birthday Card and Not Just “Have a Good One” or “Another Step Closer to the Grave, Hah Hah”
- Unlimited Class Hugging but Not For So Long it Gets Awkward
- Unlimited Class Maintaining Eye Contact with Someone While They Tell You Some Boring Story They For Some Reason Think is Totally Interesting
- Unlimited Class Stealing from the Rich and Giving to the Poor and Also Kicking the Rich in the Balls Until their Genitals go Necrotic – (there is some argument that this last bit isn’t “nice” in a technical sense, but most everyone agrees they usually deserve it.)
What Unlimited Class Niceness Arena events can you think of?
BTW, someone pointed out that Roark-1-8 looks a bit like Goon Squad. Or a lot. Well, it’s not. I guess I have an armor design in my head, and I have to put effort into deviating from it.
Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.
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!
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Tbh, I prefer Gail’s outfit over Bluce’s.
And I would watch the $#%& out of a niceness tournament. That sounds amazing!
Agreed, just out of curiosity, is pipperin a nasal irritant to her species? Because she looks one good sneeze from popping out of that
This is reminding me of Leeloo’s original outfit in The Fifth Element, but this lady is bustier.
And Leeloo didn’t look cross-eyed all the time..
“And Meganice Supermaid opens by offering cookies and tea. That’s Cookie-monster’s weakness. Let’s see if he can repress the reflexive “Grab the cookies and shove them in their mouth, going “OmNomNomNom!” his species is known for!”
Buck Rogers outfit
Nah, Major Deering’s outfit ;)
Nice Buck Rogers reference.
And a nice The Fifth Element reference as well!
Multipass!
I feel like we’ve quickly moved beyond the idea these competitors are good fighters with powers or magic and quickly gotten into these are concepts with sentience. Living explosion, living mountain, can you even effectively hurt or kill these things. Even the first guy kinda reminds me of Darude’s powers, what’s the solution there? Blow up the planet they’re all on?
I mean, it’s unlimited class, so anything goes. And as far as competitors go, living concepts are pretty decent at beating the flesh and blood competitors in the preliminaries XD
I wonder if any of the competitors would be call backs to the opponents Halo faced while farming XP, to get home from the destruction of the Alari Homeworld.
Yeah, that would be very interesting. I mean, what even were those things?
I remember a South Park episode about an unlimited class niceness kind of sport where nodoby understood Randy’s sarcasm (or what Butters’ Happy Juice was).
Ooh, yes I recall that. Randy was complaining about how football was being made so inoffensive due to safety concerns that they should change the rules so the players say please and thank you and just give the ball to other players and so on and so forth. As you mention, he was doing so sarcastically and I think the newly formed sport was in fact called Sarcastiball.
And yes, Butters was so good at it that everyone thought he had some secret he wasn’t telling anyone about and Butters (due to some terrible advice from his parents) thought his erm…nightly emissions were pure happiness overflowing from his body.
I’d love to see a niceness league comic!
someone I knew in college was working on a comic; had a new team of superheroes. As a team building exercise, they went out and fought… rush hour gridlock. Imagine Frozone making extra lanes for people to drive above long lines, and Mr. Incredible picking up cars over his head, running through traffic, and putting them down on the far side of the intersection so they don’t have to wait for the light.
1980’s Buck Rogers on Bluce, and Gail stating fashionably with 5th Element Thermal Bandages. Good work, Wardrobe Dept.!
Appropriately escalated group of semifinalists, good work Dave B.!
(Powered armor either from the same manufacturer, or simply good design following function?)
Niceness Tournament events? Unlimited Class Luxury Environment Adaptation? Xenomorph Kissing Booth? Orichalcum Chef?
No, wait, I think I’ve got it: D.M.V. Line Entertainment!
Regarding organ donation by people with high regeneration, have you heard of Immortal Weakling? It’s a webtoon (which is a shame because it would absolutely benefit from classic format better) where the main character does it regularly. It’s good and I hope the hiatus will end soon.
Oh, and the way it works is that he doesn’t technically have regeneration, his body just resets to it’s default state a minute after getting hurt, anything cut off remains separately. I’m not sure if he ever looked at his own decapitated head but he could.
Thank you! Binge-read all the episodes and am ready for more.
There’s also Feral from “Strong Female Protagonist”.
Oh! I have heard great things about this comic but it’s cut in the middle and doesn’t seem likely to continue.
If it did I would absolutely want to read it.
Given that it was written by Brendan Lee Mulligan, who absolutely does not have the time for it anymore, that is likely correct. Which is a shame, since I really liked it as well.
I’d suggest reading SFP to the end of Chapter 7 (the last full chapter) and ignoring the final incomplete chapter.
Yeah, this whole aside about regeneration for charity feels way too much like a dig at one of SFP’s more noteworthy storylines for my tastes.
Not full organ donation, but Angel from Marvel donates his blood regularly to hospitals and burn units.
Wolverine doesn’t for a variety of reasons. First off being that a plethora of bad guy organizations keep trying to get hands on his blood and flesh for nefarious usage. Anyone he donated to would instantly become a target of bad guys.
Not to mention there’s no telling what heavy metal poisoning from his adamantium would potentially do to his organs if not used in someone with their own active healing factor. Though he has donated blood to his teammates in absolute no other alternative emergencies.
The short-run comic “Extermination” by Simon Spurrier (the Boom Comics one, not the Marvel X-Men crossover) had a regenerator hero who had, IIRC, donated some of his flesh for people to eat in the post-apocalypse, but ended up being held captive and used for food against his will.
nice
Another thought…
Cora is talking about Roark-one-eight’s legs, may he rest in peace.
She is either suffering phantom-limb-empathy, or just lost a side bet.
The art in Unlimited Class Hugging is to extend the hugs as much as you can without making it awkward. It’s hard but they are Unlimited Class for a reason.
Also stealing from the rich ad giving to the poor is decisively not nice. It’s good but those are different things. Good is about morality, nice is about interpersonal relations. They usually synch well but it’s just like tough love is good but not nice.
No, it’s okay. The rich don’t have feelings the way that people do
The reason thjey are rich is because the don’t have the ethics to stay away from unethical and profitable ventures such as insider trading, drug trading, slave trading and sending out email spam. This shows that they don’t have feelings bcause if you did they would feel bad about it.
What about Scrooge McDuck? He’s ethical. Just cheap.
Unlike Flintheart Glomgold, who is both cheap and unethical.
McDuck may be ethical, but not all-knowing. Depending on the continuity, he owns a fair few properties that were acquired by unethical means. Not necessarily by him, but by the people he acquired the properties from. I recall a castle in Scotland that was apparently haunted, but in Scooby-Doo fashion, it turned out to be a bunch of practicing druids trying to scare McDuck’s family away because the castle was built on top of sacred standing stones and the druids forcibly removed by McDuck’s ancestors.
To his credit, Scrooge did feel bad about the situation and helped create a method to offer reparations the group for their loss, but the point remains that even if you are not personally unethical, the means that build you fortune still can be, because your business partners might be doing the unethical stuff without telling you. This sort of thing is a big issue in the chocolate industry, because a lot of labor supplying the cocoa beans is down with child and/or slave labor. The problem is these plantations are in Africa and there is not enough oversight to be sure all the cocoa beans are being produced ethically and demand for chocolate is astronomical, so new unethical plantations are constantly being set up even if some are being closed down.
Hang in there Cora, but he’s not wrong. I’m sure she has feed-back from the hard light, but I doubt it’d be that bad. It still brings to mind the picture of him on top of Sydney, and all we’d see is her hands and feet sticking out LOL. Heck, his head is almost the size of her torso.
These are pretty corny names, but if you think about it, having to take the time to come with that many names in a short time is pretty demanding. I remember the times I went though naming paralysis while playing Diablo 2 and Baldor’s gate…
By the way, that one giant that had the bad name? I would just called him “Alloys.”
Perhaps the issue is the Universal Translator attempting to render naming systems built from phonemes, ideograms, and semantic‑geometry constructs outside human cognition.
When it encounters an untranslatable element in a pheromone chord or topological knot, it defaults to Whimsey Mode, which UCBA intentionally leaves enabled to increase engagement metrics. UCBA monetizes the chaos.
I’d put a qualifier on the “Unlimited Class Condolences” in that it must be original enough and not be a cliche or over used condolence. (E.g., no “they’re not in pain anymore”, “they’re in a better place”, “I’m sorry for your loss”.)
Also, with the organ donation… It depends on if the “master molecule theory” is at play. Basically, that the part that regenerates the rest of the body has to be the one that contains the primary molecule/cell/cell cluster that identifies whatever is connected to it as the “primary body for regeneration”. (E.g., this is why when Deadpool was ripped in half in the second movie they didn’t end up with two of him.)
– Unlimited Class Helping People Get Things from Difficult Places (I.e., short people helping tall ones get stuff from awkwardly low places, and tall people helping short ones get stuff from difficult high places. Any taller guy who’s gone grocery shopping knows this one well.)
– Unlimited Class Helping Old Folks Across the Street
– Unlimited Class Saving Cats from Danger
– Unlimited Class Helping Change a Tire (Are you able to be the fastest jack in town?)
– Unlimited Class Teaching Illiterate Adults to Read
– Unlimited Class Helping Feed the Homeless (Regenerating Minotaurs and fruit bearing Treants tend to have the advantage here. As do Deities of Harvest or Nature.)
– Unlimited Class Volunteering for Worthwhile Charities
– Unlimited Class Helping Build Low Income Housing (Jimmy Carter was the frontrunner in this event until he passed away.)
– Unlimited Class Cleaning up Pollution and Garbage
The Number One Rule to the entire competition, of course, is that you have to put in the work yourself. This means someone like Deus can’t win by simply spending absurd amounts of money to buy a school for free adult education, or buy a bunch of food replicators, or pay to have an entire city built for those with low income/fixed disability benefits.
The question is whether they are the fastest jack in Jefferson County.
Unlimited Class: Making an old person think that you helped them across the street when you really didn’t.
The comedic potential helps you measure the winner more easily.
And pregnant women/insert third sex for cases when the carrier is not either of the contributing sexes/whatever pronoun natural hermaphrodite species prefer in their last trimester. Mom had a couple grocery stockers helping her get stuff from lower shelves during one pregnancy because her kneecaps did funny dislocating things if she tried to squat down, and was way to front heavy to bend. They decided after the first couple of times they helped her off the ground it was much easier just to get stuff for her.
I’ve got a few ideas:
-Unlimited Class Teaching a Disobedient Child
-Unlimited Class Being Curious To Help Kickstart Someone Else to Have Empathy
-Unlimited Class Changing the Built Environment to Encourage Good Behavior
-Unlimited Class Grappling with the Structural Consequences of Your Actions While Still Doing Net Good
Not sure of the name but there’s a webcomic where a super has regeneration and donates her organs but it’s pretty messed up. She can’t be anesthetized so everything she donates leaves her in horrific agony but she’s basically mentally ill and feels compelled to donate to save everyone. The only thing the title character could do was blackmail another super into super-charging her regeneration otherwise the woman would be donating all the time and never have time to do anything else. Poor woman needs therapy but clearly the system’s set up not to get her any since it exploits her so they don’t have to get donations from normals.
I also remember another novella the female main character had immortality to a degree, but her body’s regeneration would require shutting off the heart so it could regenerate things. This led to a tragedy of errors where she ends up in an emergency room where they’re trying to save her while her power keeps shutting her heart off so it could repair her until they think she’s dead. As a result her husband has her organs donated and just as she finishes regenerating everything she’s cremated which finishes her off, but the epilogue a girl who got her heart is shown suddenly without scars showing she’s inherited the woman’s immortality. It also implies as long as you removed and transplanted the heart successfully you could make anyone immortal.
I think that was in Worm?
Your first paragraph refers to Strong Female Protagonist, regrettably abandoned. The title character didn’t exactly blackmail the other super so much as kidnap him and force him to do that under pain of death. I always thought that was unethical, but then I’m not a utilitarian. Also may have been unnecessary since she didn’t even _try_ offering the other super (an Objectivist) the $10million she received from the same person who told her about the other super.
“He’s not dead. He’s mostly dead!”
I make a man mountain joke in the previous thread and here we got one, plus a living explosion…
Apple, pen, pen, apple, pineapple theory says the get combined in a weird way.
Like suddenly Living explosion suddenly finds itself in a dark, dank cave. Man mountain suddenly looks like he’s gonna erupt. And is trying to hold it in.
“Looks like we have ourselves another prison marriage, Bruce. Oh what’s with that face, like you haven’t been to jail before.”
“Seems we’re registering more explosions internally… similar in nature to … and there goes Eat more Chicken and man mountain’s eyes have crossed. Is he doing the PeepeePoopoo dance? “
How would Deus interpret such? A threat? A promise?
Bluce, not Bruce.
Strong Female Protagonist (by Brennan Lee Mulligan) has a large and nuanced plot about a super with regeneration that donates organs, and the ethical and logistical things that come along with it. That and Grrl Power are by far my two favorite stories about superheroes ever.
You both deal with the actual realities of what the world would be like if supers were real, but in very different ways and it is so brilliant and insightful what you do.
“Unlimited class, uhm- damn, what do the American cows say?”
“Peacekeeping?”
“Great! Now, shall we keep the peace, unlimited class.”
If there was an opposite to Unlimited Class fighting, it would be unlimited class meditation, which if existed is still running now, but got so low ratings, that its a side note of a news story when a contestant up and dies instead of gaining enlightenment or ascendance.
Actually, Unlimited Class Teaching would be fascinating.
Not only would there be the aspect of how many could be taught at once and the speed of teaching, there would also be retention of the subject matter, usefulness of the subject matter to daily life, variety of subject matter, how potentially damaging the teaching method is…
Like, a living equation that can propagate through discussion sweeping through a planet and giving everyone knowledge of higher-dimensional mathematics is all well and good, but not if it makes all the farmers forget how to grow food. On the other hand, a single ‘old master’ picking a pupil and imparting deep and life-changing lessons through Karate-Kid style training, leaving that person better off emotionall than they were before with both practical day-to-day skills AND combat capability over the course of 6 months, might possibly score better than the Learn-O-Tron 6000 downloading kung-fu philosophy texts into the brains of a 20 person classroom in an afternoon.
How do semi finals work with 5 people? Max, Kaboomoid. Eat Chicken, Mount Atrocitus and Obsidian Forge.
Only one has to survive the semi-final.
It’s a series of battle royal fights. only 1 winner per group, bunch of groups per bracket with one winner each to enter the next one all the way up to the final battle royal.
Everything happens in 8-contestant battle royales. Five contestants introduced today plus the three in the previous comic for this specific semi-final match.
There were 64 elimination rounds with 1 winner each. Those 64 winners were divided into 8 semi final rounds, with 1 winner each. The 8 winners of the semi-finals will go on to the one final 8v8 match.
I happen to know a few things about forges, and can say that depending on the exact construction, obsidian would not be the worst thing to build one out of.
First, Obsidian has a very high heat capacity and tends to melt rather than shatter under heat, this is because obsidian is an amalgam of dozens of elements. Physical force easily chips the stiff, but it flakes off rather than shattering, again due to the amalgam.
That out of the way, let’s talk forge construction.
First is the open topped solid fuel style forge. This style is the most forgiving of construction material, the simplest possible being a literal hole in the ground with a pipe (a tuyere) leading from the surface to somewhere close to the bottom. This lets you get air to the bottom(ish) of the fire, which is necessary to feed the fire to get it hot enough to bring steel to forging temp. As a note, forging temp is still below the melting point of obsidian.
You might still get thermal shock in the sides of your open topped, solid fuel forge, and the tuyere will have issues which is why it either comes in from directly below (you’ll need a fire rake to remove clinker), or if it comes in from the side, it’s often water cooled, or sometimes make from ceramic (often just clay fired through use in the forge itself). The ash from the burning fuel actually protects things quite nicely, which means that you can actually hit temperatures hot enough to set fire to your steel.
The second major type of forge is a gas fueled forge, these don’t get as hot, and often have layers of rock wool or fire brick style insulation. These forges can never be open topped, because the heat would escape. A smith will often have to close the two openings of the forge with spare fire brick, to keep the heat in. It’s still possible to burn your steel in a gas forge, but it’s much harder to pull off.
The third major type of forge is induction, which uses magnetic fields to heat steel from the inside out. I don’t have one, but they’re neat as hell.
Confusing matters is that a forge can also refer to the smithy as a whole, meaning the building or workplace.
Adding in super science and alien magic would probably replace the fuel, but not the actual structures. This means that you can count machining tools and power hammers and such as part of the forge.
The very important final point here, a forge heats material to *below* the melting point. You use heat to soften the material to then shape it. Machining is shaping the material cold, and casting is when you melt it in a furnace and crucible, then pour the molten material into a mold.
All three methods of shaping material can exist in a forge (the building), but said building or area must contain a forge (the hot thing) to be considered a forge, otherwise it’s a machine shop or a foundry.
Unlimited Class Awkward Polite Conversation in an Elevator
Is it just me, or does the vote incentive not work? I can’t find a way to open it.
Kaboomoid sounds like something the super powerful Nth degree alien races would come up, because they’re bored and they sort of look like that anyways?
Having the power to stop/rewind time among other Nth degree powers must make participating in this COMPLETELY SAFE. And probably winnable if they wanted to, but they’re NOT CERTAIN so they’re curious about Maxima’s powers.
P.S.: also no need to guess what happens when he’s done testing Maxima / having fun, his powers sound soooo one use LOL
apparently, the Care Bears are in a winning streak on the niceness arena but the sesame street is vying for them!
“Something that required conscious effort would probably be fine, but Wolverine donating half of his liver would probably have dire consequences.”
The healing factor once regenerated him from a single cell. Yet he also doesn’t spawn clones like Lobo, every time his blood is spilled. So presumably it knows there is a “main body” and should not make more?
You can probably set it up to:
– work from a core
– that core is not a normal organ, so you aren’t donating it
– you never remove your core
– you probably set it up to break if removed, so nobody tries to steal it
So, depending on the percentages, that could be the “Steel Giant,” “Stainless Steel Giant,” or “Tool Steel Giant.”
Regardless, in this class, steel just ain’t gonna cut it.
Nah. Goon Squad needs to be a member of the same race as Roarke. imagine if he got stuck on earth cuz of some shenanigans and they just assumed he was a super. it would put him on a whole nother level and have them (arcswat that is) saying ‘wtf, were you going *EASY* on us?’ besides, Goon squad was actually pretty cool as a character (gotta love multiple-man type stuff) and he deserves some more screen time…maybe even heroically…
hehe…and eat-chicken needs to suddenly blow up cuz Roarke multiplies a bunch of times….
This scene is going to result in Sydney’s first three-way, isn’t it?
The only class of people who deserve to be kicked in the balls (sexist) until their genitals go necrotic are those who want people kicked in the genitals because they belong to the wrong class.
No one has to be mega wealthy, they are allowed to donate that money to charity or otherwise help someone other than themselves. And how do you think they got that wealthy? It’s not possible to earn that much money, but clearly it’s possible to steal, manipulate, tax evade, pump-and-dump or otherwise abuse people to acquire that much wealth.
Pessimist.
It’s impossuble to get mega-wealth from an hourly paycheck.
There exists a point where your pile of money becomes sufficient to allow wise investment. These grow on their own, whether they are ethical or not. In the U.S.A. the 401K plan is supposed to allow hourly wage-earners to retire on their 401K investments. But the trick is that 401K money is invested through 3rd parties, and only ever buys “common” stocks, not “voting” stocks.
So the system is rigged, which I think is what you were trying to say. Recent news said that stock prices set new record highs: billionaires are becoming trillionaires. That is a reminder that stock prices are subjective, and they are also subject to inflation. Besides insider trading, politicians get their piece of the pie from lobbying, or manipulation & tax evasion as you said. The situation that exists today has been under construction for hundreds of years.
The “keep the rich rich” system was revealed in action during the Covid shutdowns, and other “too big to fail” bailouts. If you consider the aggregate of tax and other laws as a kind of structure, they contain what I call a “legal greenhouse”, built to protect huge dinosaur corporations and mega-wealthy individuals. This greenhouse was built & continues to change through ongoing gov’t lobbying. It protects the largest corporations from failure, and puts them in position to buy-out innovators who would otherwise become their destruction. This greenhouse is especially detestable in a supposedly representative republic.
A final word on the income tax. Inflation is a hidden tax within the income tax. I assert that the income tax is inherantly inflationary. Why? How? 3 levels of gov’t apply the income tax. Each applies it to their own employees. They pay them through taxes, then tax part of the money back. If, for example, the Federal gov’t exempted Federal employees from the Federal income tax, the cost to taxpayers of the Federal payroll would go DOWN: you don’t pay out what would otherwise be taken back. If you also apply this within the State and Municipal income tax systems, I believe that the 3% “expected background inflation” would largely disappear.
Carcinisation: Armored battle suits are like crabs; everything that evolves armor eventually becomes a crab.
Battle suits covering humanoid bodies will functionally be very similar.
I like how Gail’s Fifth Element cosplay is more revealing than her outfit in the vote incentive.
Unlimited class civil infrastructure refurbishment
Unlimited class terraforming
Unlimited class charity bake sale
Unlimited class fact checking
Unlimited class keeping your temper
Unlimited class helping move
Unlimited class ethics debate
Unlimited class dog appreciation
Unlimited class enlightenment
Unlimited Class Door Holding Bowl where they hold doors open for random passersby, some of whom take offense at their action and shower them with abuse (I was near Olympic rank in this one once).
I wonder if any of the competitors would be call backs to the opponents Halo faced while farming XP, to get home from the destruction of the Alari Homeworld.
Unlimited class unpaid public area cleaning competition.
Unlimited class emotional support companion.
Unlimited class renovation/construction/roadwork fatigue counseling. (Yes basically being the person to vent on about absurd detours and or living conditions.)
One of the bad scenario’s of organ donation from someone with regeneration happens in the horror manga Tomie. Though the organ doesn’t regenerate the original body so much as take over and transform the host into another instance of whatever Tomie is.
… That helmet on Roark looks familiar…
Because they’re being nice there would have to be team events where they help each other as well as being nice generally, e.g. Synchronized apologizing
Unlimited Class Cooking Competition.
“Terribly named Iron-Chromium-Cobalt-Vanadium-Molybdenum giant”
My initial assumption was that it might have been named FeCrCoVMo, but that is not a naughty word. So I don’t get the joke yet.
It’s basically “Steel Giant” but with more words. I tried to look up the precise alloy, but never found one that matched the exact named elements. I did find a few that had those elements plus a few more (silicon, etc.), and all also had carbon, but nothing with only those in the name.