Grrl Power #685 – Things are looking up… the scoville scale
If Sydney interpreted the symbol and chef correctly, “dangerously spicy” could mean most humans fall off the stool and start licking the ground to get the burning to stop, or it could actually mean they almost immediately need medical attention after ingestion. It’s probably not fatal, or it would have the downward red triangle next to it.
I was thinking about some universal icons that would make sense, and ultimately I came to the conclusion that such a thing probably couldn’t exist. In America, a check means yes, in Japan, a circle does.
Certain things could work. In a galaxy full of humanoid aliens, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of a generic skull symbol. Colors would be all over the place. Most humans generally recognize green as good and red as bad. Green is healing items, blood is red, taking cover behind red barrels is a bad idea, etc. But to people in some culture, (probably not first world ones, because we all play the same video games) but red could mean life because blood is red. And who knows what colors alien cultures would associate with what?
Fire pretty much looks like fire no matter who you are… unless your vision is entirely infrared. I assume fire looks really different in infrared. Probably not like little flickery tongues, but more of a flare at the bottom and a column of heat above it. With some wavy air currents mixed in. Of course, if you can only see in infrared, the monitor technology you’d need to replicate it would be entirely different anyway, so you could make different icons for them anyway, but you get my point. Could you see fire if you could only see ultraviolet? I assume you’d see something, but I also assume the fire icon you’d create for it would look different than a species that saw in the visible light spectrum.
So basically, on a station like this one, you’d basically have to just come up with some icons that everyone agreed on and somehow didn’t offend some race. (I mean, imagine if the ‘universal’ symbol for death was a gold cross or whatever.)
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Will she get “Baby food” :-)
She is ordering “spicy gagh”. She obviosly understands Futurtaman alien uno
I wonder if she would actually eat Gagh, no matter how much hot sauce they pour on it.
Also, in her excitement for finding spicy I feel she’ll have forgotten that she still doesn’t know how to pay for anything.
I wonder if she would actually eat Gagh, since she’s a vegetarian. Maybe, since she only doesnt eat cute things, but does eat ugly things.
But she’d have to eat it while alive, because as everyone knows….
Gagh is always best when served live.
https://youtu.be/fRG_cu4lS4g?t=49
The way Randy RIker was eyeing up the two females at the start, surprised he didn’t ask if he got to choose one or the other, or both at the same time :P
He actually did.
https://youtu.be/rFX6l8FOQXQ?t=244
He did, when the male Klingon said ‘They’re wondering how you will fare against them’ (meaning sex).
So Riker responds with “One? Or both?” At which point all the klingon’s laughed because playas respect playas. Even space playas. And Riker’s the most playa playa since Kirk.
I’m hoping that she gets the very spicy food she wants… and then her reaction to it makes the guy think the scanner misjudged, and the scanner gets updated with the info that that entry should be a green circle for humans… and then Deus comes shopping here.
Unless this food is at or near the level of the Unmaker Sauce, Sydney will probably give it back & gesture that the “spicy hot (waving hand in front of mouth) needs to be “higher (pointing index finger up). Let’s see if this guy/gal/it(?) “gets it in one.”
…In all honesty, I feel sorry for whoever has to clean up the next restroom that Sydney uses…
Full atmospheric biohazard isolation suit will be required.
+1
1 Pan galactic inferno sauce please!
The plan to the hospital is on the other side of the menu, and the organisation in charge of making you recover from the sauce is havings its best recovery plan at 2 years before you are conscious again. ALSO: voids all medical insurance plans for 7 generations.
You forgot “The liquid equivalent of setting yourself on actual fire, wrapped in a ball of napalm”.
Not to mention a list of the best places to eat it, so you don’t actually set the surrounding atmosphere on fire.
Ooh, am I first? Is this how it feels? Anyway, I wonder who is going to be shocked here, the server or Sydney. My money is on the Server, but there is a galaxy worth of spice out there, so who knows? And how’s she planning to pay anyway?
Nope, sorry you’re not first. Thank you for playing and better luck next time. :P
You know, it occurs to me that resource wise we don’t realize what we possibly have on this planet. Some of the alloys and minerals that we have commonly here could be incredibly rare outside of our solar system. How odd would it be if she dug around in her pocket a bit to find some spare change only to find out that less than a dollar of change could be worth millions in other galaxies.
Distribution of elements would be according to star age, vaguely. older stars would have formed when fewer stsrs had gone supernova, hence their planets would be lighter in ores. Since Sol is one third the age of the universe, we can probably assuke that whatever we got, most other planets do too.
My guess she will either pay by amusing the servers or by her causing an evacuation with her breath
My guess is that Deus will have deposited that precious metal into an account here and the bank will be operating on a species level, because keeping track at any level more detailed than that is too much work and thus is delegated to the species representative concerned. Which is what Deus is trying to become: the middleman for all off-planet commerce, a vastly profitable thing if he can manage it.
Oh for sure and especially if I’m right in any respect at all. Imagine Nickle in and of itself here. Common as you can get, but we don’t really consider how scarce it could be outside of our galaxy. For all we know, 100+ light years outside of the Milky Way it could be incredibly rare and a required component in manufacturing FTL systems. We wouldn’t know that however unless someone told us that.
Something like that could explain why Dabbler was on Earth to begin with.
We’ve got a pretty good idea of the abundance of elements throughout the universe. Stellar nucleosynthesis works the same everywhere, and nickel, being an even-numbered element near the peak of the nuclear binding energy curve, is going to be one of the more abundant elements.
I hate to be a buzz kill but the odds of earth having anything on the Periodic table of elements that is remotely scarce in the Universe to a society that uses a pulsar to casually violate special relativity is so unlikely that your back to saying that aliens would invade a planet full of people with Questionable mentally stability and nuclear armed paranoids because they are that desperate for Water….
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/black-hole-holds-universes-biggest-water-supply/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_giant
Grated this is a Comic, so…..
And the comic has already established that it doesn’t use scifi B movie shlock to justify impossible assertions (see Deus talking to Maxima about the geode). On the other hand, supernatural beings exist, and almost none of the superpowers we’ve seen could be explained by the current physics model (how does Sydney’s orb generate thrust? Are there any consequences to people or objects behind her?), not to mention the giant alien fight in this arc; so the comic’s external consistency is far from absolute. And if FTL travel exists, which seems likely given the existence of this station, it becomes nearly impossible to make reasonable predictions about the universe. The author could indeed reveal that Sol is unique in the observable universe, and that most stars stop fusing at (for example) carbon, and we could not really criticize this, as no expectation of “mostly real physics” has been established.
Ironically this stations existence does not prove that Faster than light travel Actually exists. in fact so far we have seen indications that at best they use Dimensional portals (Current station at the Fracture) Aetherium Causeways, (Syd) and some kind of apparently Dimensional and maybee temporal travel.
Infact one of the Bigger Sci Fi universes you may have heard of in its lore, has actually proven (in its universe) that FTL is actually impossible.
the most common FTL in use currently there is the Teraport, Prior to that they used Gates shipped by Generation ships.
Lucky number 93! I’m Lucky #93!!!!!!
Oh geez, first I was 38, now 93? How do I do it?!
It’s like I have a gift. I’d like to thank all the little people who made this possible.
I’d like to thank my parents, and I’d like to thank God….
And of course to be fair, I’ll also thank Satan.
…To be honest, it’s no good to be fair to Satan because he’s never fair to anyone else…
0.o
Well in the words of Peter Griffin, you also “thank the devil because that’s why God’s there. God’s mindin’ the fence, making sure that guy never comes back. Yknow, if it wasn’t for the devil, God would probably go insane, blow his freakin’ brains out.from boredom. Everybody likes to feel useful. Makin’ da world go round-a.”
Actually, Lucy is the fairest of them all: not only does he never lie, he also always keeps to any agreements made, it’s not his fault idiots don’t read the fine fine print or attempt to trick him
Plus word I hear is he’s a pretty good fiddle player too.
She is going to find it bland compared to her usual, and ask for extra spicy version…
Hopefully that symbol really means spicy and doesn’t actually mean acidic, as in Sulfuric Acid level acidic.
It might mean cryogenic, for liquid methane or ammonia based life, or igneous rock, for silicoids. Sydney’s taking a real chance here.
It also could mean “antique earth auto mobile” for life forms that evolved eating machine parts.
Taking the exchange at face value, the machine has analyzed her DNA and filtered out the incompatible options, so it seems unlikely that it would be showing her options for non-carbon-based life.
Well the problem is that your stomach maintains a PH of around 2.0(raging from 1.5-3.5) by producing Hydrochloric Acid
See now, the problem here is going to be the payment part. All the food in the galaxy for sale and not a space penny to her name.
The server probably has a scanner, like the counterfeit detector you’ve seen,
that Googles alien currency or assigns value to weird artifacts for payment.
Carbon crystals, zinc disks, Googly Eyes, adhesive stars, etc.
… makes me suddenly wonder what she could get for her ADHD meds in that place.
considering how cheap adhd meds are anywhere but the US, I’d bet not much.
What’s the value of those orbs?? Hovering balls of collateral until they realise she has nothing else and they try to repo them.
The last mystery orb is likely a Pangalactic Mastercard. Depending upon how long it was in that coral reef there could be quite a bit of interest built up on the account.
Let’s hope not, since interest on a CREDIT CARD is debt. I think you meant an ATM card on a savings account.
Mastercard does debit cards.
Actually, they lease the right to put the mastercard logo on ATM cards to banks. An ATM card is a bank card, NOT a real Mastercard.
Actually, you can get MasterCard debit cards, just like you can get VISA debit cards
However, these are NOT Visa cards or Mastercards themselves. They are bank cards that are licensing the right to be accepted at merchants who accept those credit cards.
Sydney is about to complete the local culinary challenge, isn’t she? You know, “Finish this unbearably spicy food in under 15 minutes, get your picture on the wall of fame.”
*Deus comes to the restaurant 10 minutes later*
*looks at the wall*
Deus: WAT.
Haha.
My worry would be that as their first human, they take Syd’s preferences as the defacto “human norm”
*Deus notices staff and customers looking at him while putting on gas masks.*
Deus: WTF.
They pulled a similar joke in the El Goonish Shive webcomic. One of those youtube-fame people who goes around hitting up eating challenges at out of the way places and as he’s recording his intro detailing the mounds of food involved for the pancake breakfast challenge and focuses on the wall with the two previous winners he gets to watch as they add the Polaroid of the hyper-active squirrel girl in her human form to the wall and completely deflating his big wind-up.
Correction: “…get your picture on the wall of flame.”
hey at least its not pancakes….https://egscomics.com/comic/2010-05-12
yeah… or BAD things might happen…
There is still the question of how she is going to pay for this alien spice.
SIMPLE ENOUGH: think thoughts horny enough to feed a succibi. Not only will she come and see, she’ll pay for your snack. (-;
I have observed this before: In Team-ups and Cross Overs, the chapter titled “Astra Gets Grrl Power,” Dabbler gives Hope a Card, which she explains:
So why wouldn’t Dabbler have incorporated such a feature in their wrist coms? Something only useful off Earth, to avoid Maxima’s ire.
Something that would work off earth with interplanetary systems risk alerting those same banking systems and probably violates her personal prime directive, (as we obviously do not have that kind of Tech to have a working in interstellar based smart card.) said prime Directive explained in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1077
Don’t think I don’t see you there cameo space ships. Especially you Planet Express ship.
Was just about to comment on them, including what looks like the Titanic from that Doctor Who episode where they killed the Aussie Singing Budgie (aka, Kylie Minogue)
The one on the end looks kinda like something from Dune (or maybe not, it looks familiar though…)
Looks like a Medical Mechanica factory ship..
One of those is DEFINITELY the Starship Titanic from the video game by Douglas Adams.
Being familiar with both, I can tell that it’s definitely the Titanic from the Douglas Adams game, not the Doctor Who one. Amazingly, the web site is still up:
https://starshiptitanic.com/
Was thinking of a different Titanic
And… it turned out to be a third… :/
Hopefully it won’t be much longer before we see Cora’s ship hovering over The Fracture.
Do we even know what it looks like? Maybe it’s already there? o_O
We had an external image when they arrived at Alar, and I don’t recall seeing anything of similar description at the Fracture yet.
Unless those are parked there, those are way too close for comfort. The risk of collision is just too high. Space Traffic Control should be trying to keep them much further apart. Mind you, then they all would not fit in the same panel.
I always give Hollywood creative license to spaceships weighdahekk too close together, especially battle scenes. Space battles will be fought at tens of thousands of km, so you’d never see one as more than a bright moving speck from the birdge of another spaceship. So yeah, Daveb gets a pass on that detail.
new word: birdge == room on ship where avians species control ship activities.
if the spaceships in panel 1 are A – B – C – D
A) ?
Definitely not from dr who. looks might be from futurama due to style.
B) planet express from futurama,
C) Starship Titanic
D) ?
anyone have any guesses for A and D?
A’s probably https://theinfosphere.org/Titanic from futurama…
Was thinking of the Titanic from the Christmas Special “Voyage of the Damned”, butt that Titanic didn’t have that thing on the bow as on the Futurama version (so that makes two Futurama ships and two different Titanic’s in one panel… )
A) I am thinking Starship Titanic from the 2007 Dr. Who Christmas Special.
D) I have seen it before, but can not place it.
A – Fhloston’s Paradise from 5th Element maybe?
Nevermind, started looking at pics and A is not… but..
look at D vs. this pic I found when googling Fhloston’s…
https://projectedrealities.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/fifthelementfoxbdcap6_original.jpg
That looks to be D, butt still not what was thinking of
Nevermind, was googling pics of Fhlostons and check this pic vs. D.
https://projectedrealities.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/fifthelementfoxbdcap6_original.jpg
There was this movie where a bunch of teenagers get visions of a chip and so on and build a spaceship from a carnival ride, and go up to meet alien… teenagers. Alien teenagers who have apparently borrowed Dad’s car for a joyride to meet Earthlings. That other ship reminds me of the alien… minivan?
A: The Titanic from Futurama ( https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQQ2ESj6Z5ZVpMy6Q707o0f8rJoicJH60T–HVR3oX5Cr3m9vDXtg )
B: The Planet Express Ship from Futurama
C. Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic
D. I think it’s the Star Duke from Malo Korrigan and the Spacer Tracers.
A. nailed the exact pic. I had a diff with that original Titanic had a red bottom.
D. Think that’s the one from Fifth Element – particularly the bow.
https://vfxblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/the_fifth_element_05.jpg
D looks like am imperial starship from WH40K space fleet Gothic, only less ornate…
There are to many commenters that think like Dave … or are reading his mind!
How many called it?
I think this is actually a good sign of storytelling – the audience should be able to predict a few things from previous scenes and character history. If they call all of it, the storyteller is relying too much on tropes, if the audience are lost there is an issue with either insufficient buildup or too many convoluted plot twists.
In this case, I think Dave did a good job of setting up expectations with with a) chaos happening at any eating establishment, b) Sydney’s weapons-grade palate, and c) space tourism supporting a variety of Earth-like life forms. Really it’s the follow pages that will make or break this scene; there are some good funnies in other comments already. If we just get a repeat of Sydney’s infirmary trip or the bank, I’ll be disappointed, but I suspect Dave will have some twist that takes things to a new place while still playing off the setup of past eating disasters.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/194 part 2?
We’ll know if in the next couple of pages if he/she/it pulls out a containment suit to cook it. Given that it’s cooking with bare skin exposed, I wouldn’t bet on it though.
On the note of “green is good, red is bad”, I cite Mirror’s Edge that I recently replayed. Red is very good, except when it’s in your eyes. Green doesn’t really feature at all.
Green is good to hide in, and also human eyes evolved to see green the best (that’s why night vision goggles are green)
Okay, if the fire means spicy hot, does the symbol beside it mean icy cold? o_O
And what about the one above the ice?
The fire one is hot. The three up carets in orange mean uber hot. Hope she likes her “spicy gagh”
Oh dear he just said the magic words. You know if cartoon physics was a thing of her Universe she would go around Spitting Fire
Welp, there goes the ‘Public Translator Field’ theory.
Unless…
It isn’t on all the time?
‘Siri, please tell my client that I recommend ordering food
without warning notices if it’s their first day here.’
I wonder if in her wanderings Sydney managed to leave the “Main Street” upper class business district, and is now in the back alley hobo district. Universal translator fields cost money, which the low rent greasy spoon places simply cannot afford to provide it in their shops.
I think it’s the case of “He understands english but doesn’t know how to speak (or can’t due to alien mouth)”
This is probably most likely the case since they have been responding to what she says with accurate answers to the question she’s asked.
more like the system chose a futuristic font
Kinda defeats the purpose of a ‘universal translator’ field if it can’t get over the hurdle of differently shaped mouths/vocal apparatus.
Hoping the chef was just making the noises usually associated with someone having willingly coated their tongue with what Sydney would consider ‘a solid 7’
Or, in their case, both of their tongues :P
A public translator field would be… difficult, unless essentially telepathic in nature.
On the other hand, humans are not actually far from an earpiece that lets you mostly understand any language on file (you can get translation apps that can make your phone “mostly” do it, and if you’ve got a bluetooth headset, that means you’re “mostly” there, about all that’s left is: getting it to “always on” listening and translating without murdering your data plan and/or phone battery; the targeting problem because there will often be more than one person speaking in day-to-day life – solve those problems, and you’re pretty much golden), and Earth is a listed vacation spot, so Earth languages are likely to be on file. Which means assuming computer tech even marginally more advanced than ours, it’d be a relatively simple matter for the food vendor to have an equivalent to an earpiece that permits him to understand everything Sydney says (and this one obviously can). To limit noise pollution (and avoid feedback loops), such a thing would most likely (very nearly of necessity, for the feedback loops) only let the wearer hear the translation (or otherwise perceive – I can easily imagine a subtitle implant, for instance).
Any translator that can’t handle more than one language spoken at a time isn’t worth ingesting
Or you could just get a Babel Fish in your ear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ctoT7ezTE
Original was betterer
Of course he understands her.
He’s bilingual.
+1 – I’ll toss you a bone… I think in addition to you getting here late (a lot like me), most people don’t recognize lingua/lingual as a reference to the tongue specifically, rather than merely the language spoken with it…
Presumably the gastro-gene scanner also manages to determine WHERE in the EM spectrum the customer’s primary sensory input lies. What humans perceive as ‘green’ probably isn’t if you see three colors into the ultraviolet.
Many insects do that (bees, wasps, at least). They see ultraviolet, but not red. Flowers pollinated by insects have ultraviolet flashes and streaks to direct the insect to the nectar, the pistils and the pollen, with the last two being the plant’s objective in this operation.
Interesting that spicy is hot for alien species. I mean, it’s spicy to mammals. On earth not even birds are fazed by capsaicin.
(One assumed reason for peppers to have it. Beaks are much less likely to damage the seeds than teeth.)
Odds on capcasin and/or caffeine being deadly neurotoxins to most galactic species?
Probably lethal to someone.
But odds are also very good that whatever Toothy McHammerhead behind the counter eats is deadly to us. Or at least completely undigestible.
Or worse yet, will remind you of pineapple pizza!
Or better yet, will remind you of pineapple pizza!
FTFY ;)
Pineapple and anchovies!
That’s right. It isn’t really “hot” in the same (semi-corrosive) sense as mustard & horseradish are, it just contains a chemical that fools our taste-buds into registering it as that.
No one said it was hot for alien species. The scanner just found that this particular dish would be hot for humans. Chances are that the chemical that triggers a “hot” feeling in the mouth is not the same for everyone on this station.
O, yes you are right. The symbols are adjusted to sidney and the barperson is interpreting the symbol.
I stand corrected.
The whole thing about birds being immune to capsaicin reminds me of a headcanon I developed once.
Thanks to her DNA being altered by the Chozo, Samus Aran also acquired their immunity to capsaicin. But she finds it entertaining to keep this detail to herself and let others think her lack of reaction is due to sheer badass. More than once she’s won a few bets by downing raw peppers that would likely give even Sydney hesitations, with no more issues than eating a common pickle.
I like this theory.
Scientists think now that while the capsaicin does not stop a bird from eating it, it does affect the birds digestive system to eject it ASAP. Help the plants in spreading seeds and get a bit of fertilizer along with it.
Animals could also use it as a way to flush out something too. dogs eat grass for similar effect.
Saw some nature video a couple of decades ago about parrots in Central America eating hot peppers and then eating some clay in a weathering cliff face for the kaolin (the same ingredient in kaopectate, an antacid) – probably for the same reason we take it.
I assume that that scanner is hooked up to a database and sets symbols based on individual species. I saw an awfully human looking individual a few pages back. And we do know aliens have visited earth.
Hay maybe that explains anal probes. They were analyzing us for what is safe for us to eat.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my mouth isn’t on that end.
You don’t need the mouth to analyze what someone ate.
Well, they know that now.
Heh. He is so impressed that if she can actually finish it it’s free. But if she fails he gets to send the video to Spaces Funnies Home Videos.
Yep, healing items are green. Except the ones marked with a red cross. Or the blue ones. Or green is also what poison damage items look like in games. Or purple. Yellow, flame, but not all flame. Universal symbols are hard.
White means holy and pure in europe and americ, but means death in japan
In parts of Europe whit also has an association to death. Not as strong as it is in Japan though.
Yup, that’s why Western Bride’s wear white :P
Sounds like you’re in the camp of; Q:”What is simultaneously the shortest and longest sentence in the English language? A:”I do.”
Well, a ‘mortgage’ that typically goes along with getting married is, literally, a ‘Death Pledge’ :P
Three page updates later She’s on a ship home…when the after effects hit her…new problem for ship enviro and crew and new problem for her. Figuring out to use an Alien head.
Captain: All’s well that ends well!
*Sydney burps*
Captain: CODE RED, CODE RED!
RADIOACTIVE FUEL LEAK EJECT EJECT
Infrared and ultraviolet light are emitted more in different kinds of fire than on wood (ex: burning magnesium yields plenty of ultraviolet light), but for wood fires:
Ultraviolet light is high-energy, while infrared is low-energy. You may notice that the hottest parts of a flame, near the base, are invisible (or white), then blue, yellow, and red. The invisible/white part near the base is ultraviolet. Similarly, there is infrared flame beyond the red flame. So if you can only see infrared, flame will seem larger than for our visible spectrum, and for only ultraviolet, the flame will seem much smaller.
Also, watching fires on IR cameras the shape of the flames looks like the visible light parts (as in would use the same icon).
That said you could easily have the icons on the screen emit UV and IR light so to someone who sees those parts of the EM spectrum the icons would look different.
That’s… actually a really clever idea, and fairly easy to build. You could just make some minor adjustments to an RGB monitor by adding some IR/UV subpixels, and standardize on an extended video coding format that included the extra data.
Assuming that the additional range isn’t harmful to most visitors in moderate doses (since they likely evolved in radiation environments similar to Earth), this would be a hugely useful technology. I’m actually thinking it’d be a fun spy toy or AR tool, although we have some pretty good ways to encode hidden data in existing mediums.
Now that you mention it even RGB might not work. It works for humans because we have RGB receptors in our eyes so the emitters line up with those. For a species with different receptors our screens wouldn’t work right or even would be a jumbled mess with only black standing out.
You mentioned video games, but health potions are red and poisons are green.
I think it is already pretty much impossible to design universal colors. I’m not even talking about species with different visual range. Just labeling the colors is already not trivial. Even on Earth, not all languages have a word for “pink” for example, even though we all have the same eyes. Imagine the mess if you have to consider alien species with different eye structure…
That smile… I’ve seen that smile many times before… Good things never follow THAT smile…
Sydney, you just came to scoville heaven.
I’m not sure I like where this is going….
Neither is the local Sanitation Union :P
And Sydney never went home again
I hope Sydney enjoys her order of “spicy gagh” wonder if it will be raw or stewed
Roasted actually. If it’s not live, then crunchy like a bowl of jalapeno peanuts is the next best thing.
Oh s***! How do you say “RUN” in alien languages?
Which one? There are literally thousands of them!
Sometimes a demonstration is the best translation. In other words…
LEG IT!!
Oh geez! *facepalm* I JUST realized that Sydney’s last name is Scoville…
……………. *puts palms to your face for extra facepalmage* they even referenced it early on that she was living up to her name!
Sydney is about to set a bad precedent for Humanity. A couple of hours later, switch to a scene where Deus is about to dine in a 4-star alien restaurant. He is about to get hit with a Scoville Special…
YES!!! Please make it so! :D
Is it just me, or did anyone else imagine 2 babelfish kissing instead of see DNA strands on the monitor???
Ironically, the gold cross was the symbol of life in ancient Egypt (the ankh) while in Rome, the cross was indeed the symbol of death, as only the most heinous of criminals faced crucifixion, considering how nasty a way to go it is. (You have to keep moving your legs up and down to breathe, and each movement is an exercise in sheer agony.) Crucifixion is noted to take three days to kill you, unless someone comes along and breaks your legs with a war-hammer. The apostle Peter had it even worse as he was crucified UPSIDE-DOWN because he didn’t believe he was worthy of going the way Jesus did.
Yeah, getting multiple cultures on the same planet to agree to a set of symbols is painful enough. Cultures from multiple worlds that never met agreeing to the same symbols? That’s going to take divine intervention.
Humans see one octave in the electromagnetic spectrum, and it’s not a coincidence that its the octave which has the most transparency on Earth’s surface. Nor is it a coincidence that you could assign do re mi fa so la ti as the color bands in a rainbow and have the right number of names, an octvave is an octave, whether light or sound, it’s all vibrations. (Good good good GOOD vibrations!)
Presumably, seeing in the infrared or ultraviolet would mean that the subject would see an octave in those scales. I have seen many infrared and ultraviolet images of fire, but I do not recall seeing any that attempted to break out colors as a representation of the octave in that block. It would be interesting to see such an image.
Not as brave (or gastro-suicidal) as Sydney, butt just had some Maggi Fusian Laksa noodles
Did them different than usual: boiled them on the stove instead of simply adding hot water and waiting (almost boiled it dry before even adding the flavour sachets, hopefully will do better next time)
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!
This is what I could translate from that list:
Bachelor Chow
“Ham” Burger
Lasagna
Spicy Gagh (what Sydney was contemplating)
Cat food
If the “Gagh” does not meet up her culinary standards for spiciness, will she let it slide? Being indignant in her situation would be counterproductive. She could her use her pepper spray to kick it up a notch, though. On the other hand, it could go beyond her expectations and hilarity ensues.
Woo! glad someone found my hints!
I also saw on the right side menu.
– chunks of stuf…
– fish ….
The Futurama ship at the top was a hint of the font to use for the translation.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2623/4105492248_83e472056e.jpg
Also, I would now like to apply for my official Pre-Cog license since in previous comics I predicted BOTH that Sydney will find herself at a restaurant with ultra-spicy food, and that she will get a plate of gagh.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/3000/comment-page-2#comment-710641
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/3025/comment-page-1#comment-717377.
Ah, +1 to you too. I think I got the first translation today thou. meh. Then my ADHD kicked up and I waited to do the whole menu, to uncover some of the more … questionable food stuffs. Then saw Mr_Vest’s post, and decided to pop in the remaining bits I could see.
Wonder if the ‘cat food’ was aimed at the Kzinti? not sure what the white reverse asterisk symbol might mean. Also wonder what all the menu items were. Technically all the items can be consumed by humans. hm chunks of stuf = ‘Carne es de rata’ ?
We need a little more information on the restaurant to determine if they think cat food means ‘food for cats’ or ‘cats as food’. If the programmers who set up this system knew human culture and were proper nerds in their own culture, then they would have made the title at the top of the human compatible menu say ‘To Serve Man’.
Either way, it would make an interesting episode of “Andrew Zimmerman’s Bizarre Foods Universal”.
Someone actually predicted this on the comment board last strip. Congrats. You win the clairvoyance award!
Did anyone else notice the PlanetExpress ship in panel #1?
Also I think Starship Titanic? Unless that’s a ship from Warhammer 40K?
and she found the equivalent of US Chinese food diner judgeing by those icons. like how menus have chili pepper aginst a menu item and 2 to 3 for scale lol
In China (and surrounding countries) red is good (usually prosperity or romance, but it depends on the context, obvs), and white means death.