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.)
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Something that may appeal to Sydney: plant-based meat!
No animals were harmed in the production of that burger!
Beefsteak tomatoes? That’s plant-based meat, right? ;)
Not… quite, this is meat without using animals (and not fucking tofu!!!)
I prefer seitan myself, but some people swear by Tempeh.
Eww…He mentioned Tofu. Tofurkey and other “Faux” meats made with tofu are an affront to the universe.
https://i1.wp.com/theguiltyvegetarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/FarSide-Tofudebeest1.jpg
Or it could just be really ugly animals that she’s eating the meat of.
Sydney’s vegetarianism only extends to cute animals. Fish and other uggos are totally delicious and allowed to be consumed, remember? :)
Yes, butt this ‘meat’ is animal-free
I think Sydney would still have a problem eating an Oddish.
but on the specific link, texture and fibrous to imitate flavor. In which case it is easier to go with fungi, old Buddhist cooking has a ton of recipes for using various mushrooms, vegetables, and spices to give vegetarian dishes a meat flavor.
I made a recipe using random stuff I had too much of, and it turned out to be a vegan dish that tasted like meat. Mostly used carrots and red pepper flakes (like from Pizza Hut).
Just because it isn’t meat doesn’t make it non-sentient.
Could be plenty of plant based lifeforms on that space station.
As well as purely synthesised food, how about breeding something that wants to be killed and eaten?
Talking about real life, not the comic
I must say, I’m actually hoping Sydney gets a lunch she can enjoy – maybe even one that’s on the hot end for her. After all the awful she went through on her first off-world mission, she deserves a bit of a break and recharge.
Translation or a way to get home would be a nice bonus. The debt for all this … not quite so much. But expected.
And after dinner, a place to sleep… it’s been a LOOONG day for our heroine!
Maybe some loud swearing might draw Deus’ attention.
(She could swear, and still be lovin’ it, knowing Syd.)
See, everyone is bringing up the icons, which I get, but for me the more interesting thing is that he (I suppose it could just as easily be a she, aliens being what they are.) CLEARLY understands her, yet I don’t think it’s occurred to her because now all she can think of is committing extraterrestrial war crimes. With her mouth. Also possibly her butt. Hopefully no one is taking a wideshot photo behind her again. (They wouldn’t survive.)
Noticed it too, she is TOO focused on eating to realize that while this alien isn’t speaking back that they clearly understand her.
Nah, he doesn’t really understand her, he merely interacted with oblivious tourists for far too long…
I feel this is relevant: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SchmuckBait/RealLife — particularly the Nuclear Waste Site entry.
All i can say is i love the look on her face. its like ~ DING IS THIS NIRVANA?!~
“Dangerously spicy, you say? Good thing I LIVE for danger!
“You might say I… eat it for breakfast?” (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAA
You see different colors even in US culture. In industrial systems, a red light demands instant attention. In medical environments, it’s a blue light, because if your patient is turning blue…..
And regarding healing colors, note that the international doctor symbol is a *red* cross.
Except where it’s a red crescent.
Or a red ‘Star of David’… and back in the Shah’s time, the equivalent in Iran was the red ‘lion & sun’ as in their national flag…
Later, Sydney would learn that this is actually alien sign for “causes you to aspirate your ganthrip glands” which for humans roughly translates as “makes you sneeze your eyelids around the wrong way.”
Sydney is going to end up one way or another washing a huge stack of dishes to pay for eating. Then Dabbler’s friends are going to arrive to take her home, but she’s going to get dish pan hands first.
or by sheer Chekov’s gun coincidence the felt in her craft pocket is a rare material…or when scanned qualifies as a super rare and valuable edible spice for this species and will qualify as a swap.
We fans have already debated & established the extremely high value of googly eyes in one of the Fracture’s accepted pangalactic currencies (“Yeets”)… But I’ll admit genuine Yarthling sheep’s wool felt could possibly have a medium level of value, especially if there isn’t enough cash in the till to make change for something that high in value…
She is actually a mutant…but with only the power of being immune to spice. Which is NOT the most useless mutant power you can get. (That would be ‘three apendixes, and must take a stabalization serum or keel over dead.)
she is not completely immune to spices , she noticed the “unmake” sauce and when a bit splashed into her eye it hurt her but she does has a mutant like tolerance for it.
On Stan Lee’s Superhumans they had a woman who truly was immune to capsaicin. She took a direct spray of military grade pepper spray in the eyes with no effect and could snack on ghost peppers.
There’s two key questions about her food…
Will it kill her?
Will it be of benefit to her?
There are in nature a goodly variety of sugars, but as people we can only digest a few of them.
(Allose, altrose, glucose, mannose, gulose, idose, galactose, talose, psicose, fructose, sorbose, tagatose, etc, etc, etc)
Getting her something of nutritional value will be a neat trick.
That’s what the machine just scanned for. The clerk may not be able to vocalise English, but I’m sure they’ll steer her away from the dangerous stuff.
…Also, I suspect the “hot n spicy” stuff the clerk is trying to warn her about is actually “mildly piquant at best” in Scoville Jr. units.
there’s a world of difference between ‘won’t kill me’ and ‘healthy for me’.
So much so, you can market food as having no nutritional value, as a diet food. ‘Sure, this tastes so sweet you’d think a bite would add fifty pounds, but in truth you can’t process the sugars – it is zero calorie. Some of the bacteria in your gut however, can process it. Don’t be surprised when you vent enough methane to power a small city.’
Don’t be surprised at different cultural norms either. Just on earth we have cultures where it’s normal and expected that you’ll … run from dangerous critters fun (running of the bulls), kill dangerous critters for entertainment (matadors), purchase your bride (various with dowry, the more modern example being mail order brides). Insert alien cultures with alien biological needs (the Drooglits need to bleed themselves once a month, and the Viltas use that blood for key nutrients…) and suddenly meals become complicated affairs.
Throw in allergies, which are not genetic, and things get more exciting.
Dowry is the other way, ya dingus. It’s what the bride brings, financially, to the table, not some kind of fucking purchase order.
Who teaches people this nonsense?
Yup. And (if the marriage were to be dissolved for ANY reason) it had to be returned. If it were a piece of jewellery, often that same exact piece – no substitutes.
Dowries functioned as prenuptial agreements to protect the bride.
Also, if the husband died before this wife, the dowry was automatically set aside to support [or to help support, anyway] her in her widowhood regardless of who inherited the rest of his estate.
‘Who teaches people this nonsense?”
Good question. Who’s your teacher?
https://qz.com/92267/in-a-reversal-of-the-dowry-chinese-men-pay-a-steep-price-for-their-brides/
I left out stranger practices such as marriage by abduction and ritualized torture.
Shocker, I know: The world is a wide and strange place.
It even states in the URL that it is a reversal of a dowry, which means it is NOT the norm, in fact, it’s the opposite of the norm
You do know how much an engagement Ring costs, right? Granted its not a full years pay, and given what the bride’s parents pay for some weddings nowadays you could say that was a dowry in itself
A ring is not the same thing (not to mention the value of the ring is primarily arbitrary and set by just one family)
Are you saying (or implying) that the parent’s of the bride don’t pay for the wedding? o_O
Wouldn’t, “Sydney vs The Super Nova” be a better title because she’s on a restaurant in outer space?
I am personally disappointed that, because of what the scanner is calculating, the title of the page is not “To Serve Man”.
Oh Dave, you haven’t lived yet.
A friend of mine showed me some “fire color crystals” that make fire change colors.
Here’s a youtube video of them in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4eAbxsqmjQ
Fireworks are heated metal, and those are various colors. Also different gases burn different colors. So, fire could be naturally purple and a red one would be strange, or welding torches are bright blue fire.
That reminds me of a moment when I was a child, at my grandparents’ house, they heated it via a woodstove, and one day my grandpa tossed a spoonful of crystals into the flames, turning them blue-green. I wanted him to do it again and again, but he told me it was to help clean the creosote out of the chimney pipe, and shouldn’t be used heavily. He also pointed out that it wouldn’t taste good to cook over on a campfire…so I’d guess the crystals in the video also shouldn’t be used on a cooking fire.
(Also, you don’t really cook over flames; you cook over embers, which are much, much hotter. Flames can sear the outside and turn foods golden brown (caramelization), but it’s an ephemeral heat, a flash of heat and then it’s gone. Embers put out a lot of heat over a long time.)
“He who controls the spice… controls the arguably most powerful human in the universe.”
Very off topic but has there been any discussion about one of Sydney’s orbs being a translation device? Given her personality I don’t think she would waste the chance to try them in a new environment like this. Gotta be like a constant itch not knowing what they do (and how to exploit them).
Lots of discussion, basically if it exists it is either a function of the unknown orb, or one of the remaining nodes on the comm orb.
My guess would be comm orb
Hi this is one of the few times i have decided to send a comment, and I only have 1 thing to say, Halo looked a lot prettier and better drawn at the beginning of the comic than now, lately whenever you draw her she looks not so pretty, Thank you for your hard work and for your time i will continue looking at the series.
Still wonder HOW she is going to pay for it mind you.
Don’t do it Sydney! Everyone will think it’s a chemical attack! You’ll start a riot!
Well, at least you’ll be undisturbed.
Sydney’s paper money is either valueless or buy-a-meal for $0.25.
She should slap down a single to see if it is acceptable.
Don’t want to look like a rube from some backwards planet in front
of the server staff.
In the episode of ‘Fairly OddParents’ where GrandPa babysits Timmy,
the $20 TIMMY’S DAD gave them for pizza turns into a fortune when
Cosmo and Wanda send all of them to Old Time CartoonLand.
That $17 may not get her to Earth, but an Earth dollar goes a long way
in the food court, especially in the rowdy section on the wrong
side of the portals.
FIRST, vegetarian does not have a meaning if an alien Phylogenetic tree does NOT have a distinction between animal and vegetal — or if the sentience is on the vegetal side only!!!
SECOND, this food has not been deemed SPICY HOT for humans; it has been deemed SPICY HOT for Sydney, specifically, based on individual DNA!!!
THIRD, the air generating orb is about to be used instinctively to get water.
FOURTH, a spicy-for-Sydney-specific-DNA level of spicy may cause an outburst that will DEFINITELY trigger a police investigation, hence cop ex machina translation
FIFTH, Deus Ex Machina is around the corner, so he might actually try having what she’s having, and need to have his brain-parasite find a new host temporarily as a result freeing Deus-the-human-host-who-is-a-super to whine he won’t get his daily promised quota of high-end fucking without Deus-the-brain-snatcher’s help!!!
SIXTH, even THAT won’t be as much trouble as the SPICY SMELL triggering a space police investigation for chemical weapons originating from hell, and metaphor about the sun inside this space station being made so hot it goes full monocerotis v838
SEVENTH, and if that alien doesn’t discover chocolate and consider it payment, things might start to go south. Someone might even show up that knows Sydney is from a pre-contact race.
EIGHTH, Deus might want payment for rescuing Sydney.
NINTH, maybe the alien is warning Sydney about something else. Like boob growth potion, or SALTY overload. Or 1470800% sugar content. Or ferret balls being made obsolete as a unit of surprise!!!
i think the chemweps thingie is unlikely, this is a major port looks like, of an advanced tech level; there are lots of aliens; say an alien race comes from a planet where the atmo is methane; their idea of food would be vastly different from ours so i think while she might injure herself or another, like the eyenoodle incident, i doubt it will be considered a terrorist atk or something
Regarding the second point, spicy is as much or more about nurture than nature. Some people are born a bit more capsaicin tolerant, but if they don’t eat a lot of spicy food–such as a Norwegian or a Finn–then they’re not going to be able to tolerate what someone who grew up in El Paso eats for baby food.
And I do mean baby food. Mostly it is a case of being exposed to it as a very young child to moderately young child. That sets the intial tolerance. Then, you develop an actual preference for it. then (as if that weren’t enough) you stretch your tolerance by consuming food that is more spicy than before.
All of that is external, learned experience, not internal, genetically encoded. I’ve personally met a Finn, a person born and raised and still living in Finland, while I was in Finland last year for the World Science Fiction Convention, who adored ghost peppers. Most Finns are not used to very spicy foods. He said he was introduced to peppers on a trip to Cancun, Mexico with his family. He absolutely loved it, and continued to seek out or ask for peppery hot foods for birthday and holiday gifts. Traditional Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish foods are…subtle, shall we say…in their flavors. Yet he was perfectly fine with eating it.
Before anyone can say, “Well he must have a genetic mutation for enjoying peppers, it’s nature, not nurture!” …He could barely tolerate anything stronger than a bell pepper when he started, but he still pushed the envelope. His wife, also a Finn, didn’t originally like peppers…but admitted she had learned to tolerate and even learned enjoy them because of her husband’s enthusiasm for spicy cuisine. Admittedly she can’t tolerate the same level he can, but she doesn’t have some sort of “genetic mutation” yet she’s learned to enjoy them. (We had a lovely long conversation about food and various seasoning types & intensity levels found around the world.)
Sydney didn’t teethe on a frozen ghost pepper as an infant. Maybe a slice of frozen bell pepper, but she still had to work her way up to ghost peppers.
Maybe she was bitten by a radioactive ghost pepper when she was a baby – and thus has a tolerance well above “bites your eyes when you come near it”.
“Like, dangerously spicy?” I’ve got to see what this measures on the Sydney scale. :)
If you’ve been paying attention, then you’d know that Sydney considers ‘dangerously spicy’ to be an acceptable starting point.
Dangerously spicy would probably be higher than 3.000.000 Scoville
Page 118 seems to suggest that she’s still phased by stuff significantly under that mark.
I’m sure someone else already suggested this, but what if the final orb is a translator orb?
It is usually suggested every time she does not understand some other beings, sorry ;)
Pretty much every second page :P
A nice system, do a DNA scan then they can create a profile of the species and what they can eat and drink, the what they cannot. Sophisticated science there. Plenty of CPUs in used to compute it and read her entire genome in seconds. Compatible language concepts in picture form. (No doubt the types used by that species can see colors and all.) I like that idea.
The only problem will be in paying for it once she decides. She really needs a Chomsky-Babylon translator in her ear or on her brain.
Translator microbes from Farscape are still one of my favorite devices for that.
Been noodling about a space setting for a while. One big issue is how to handle graphics. The majority of computer monitors are big clunky CRT-like units that present white-on-black with the resolution of an old Atari 2600. The reason for the bulk is so they hit as much of the EM spectrum as possible. What looks like white pixels actually reach into the deep infra-red and up to the UHF radio bands. This gets combined with a couple other specific compatibility devices for exotic senses.
Hey don’t know if anyone else is seeing this but on my screen the comics being pushed onto the right side of the page covering the who’s who part up. I’m on mobile If that helps
Post which mobile platform (apple or android), and which model of phone. Also try looking for system or browser updates and get those downloaded and installed.
Having the same issue on my desktop, I use Chrome (which auto-updates with me)
Don’t forget the biohazard suits, and decontamination system that would be required to clean said spills.
Hottest food in the galaxy. Too spicy even for fire elementals.
SYDNEY: Mmm almost there.
Sydney previously mentioned earning some funds as a crane operator moving freight.
How many people think that Sydney in warehouse would probably end up something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CFTIOQCqTc
Not really, if she can buckle down long enough to take a scuba course or help run a business, she’s definitely capable of working in a warehouse without causing accidents. In my experience it’s usually a younger employee with a normal neuro-type that’s taken over a manager type position that triggers stuff like this by trying to act overly confident in their own skills rather than paying attention to their surroundings… Having a work area reek of mayonnaise for a few months may have given me a reason to distrust overly-confident 19 yr old man-boys with heavy equipment though…
I get the feeling that Sydney would make the guys on Epic Meal Time feel like chumps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yTfs5W7bxw
I can just envision a day where she has just eaten the hottest foot she can, and then on purpose or accident french kisses someone.
Better yet gets french kissed by an alien (you know which one) …
All I can say if tomorrow comic is not her eating, something spicy and yummy in honor of (USA Thanksgiving) I am going to be Awfulmad!
But if she does I will still be Awfulmad! hehe
Highly suggest the series by James White. Stories of a multi-being hospital. The writer was impressive on a classification system, engineering various spaces for beings that have different environmental needs. All wrapped up in a series of really engaging storys.
“Most humans generally recognize green as good and red as bad.”
In video games, a green flask is a poison, and a red flask is healing around 99% of the time. So much so that if you were somehow in a mad scientist’s layer and bleeding, if you saw various flasks with practically neon contents in various pure colors, you’d be tempted to drink the red flask before even looking for bandages. Although if it was really a mad scientist’s lab, odds are yellow = poison, green = poison. red = poison. Blue = man… nah, that’s poison too.
Hmmm. If I had to pick symbols to represent compatability of alien foods anything that stayed the nutral dot would be edible/likable by your biology. The rest – I can guess your symbols for hot and cold, but I would take hot to mean like – you just ordered a piece of magma or a hot coal.Hot spicy would cross with toxic, so poison symbols with bars for extremity on their own scales.. Maybe a ROCK for hard (indigestible) objects, and something akin to a battery or something for Nutritional + Will give you Lots of Energy,
Well, there’s the chance of lithovores, of course… Abd what do alien batteries look like?
You, sir, are having entirely too much fun drawing spaceships. I swear I saw both Flash Gordon’s ship and the Titanic cruising by in low-altitude orbit.
Panel 1 has the Starship Titanic from Douglas Adam’s (yes, THAT Douglas Adams) book of the same name. Is that the one you’re referring to or have you also seen the ocean liner?
Couple days ago we had both the Battlestar Galactica and the NCC-1701 Enterprise as well.
The first step should be simple. Once the entity scans, then the menu shows ONLY the foods safe to eat for that entity.
I like the idea of a race-credit bank. When a habitable planet is discovered, the races have their genetic code recorded and a nominal sum is deposited. If any of them advances enough to join the greater galactic community, the inflation will hopefully give them enough credit-cash for either seed money or to buy their own planet back. Of course, races discovered late in their growth are screwed…
It’s like his only art knowledge is to do with shading and lighting, and he forgot to learn about anatomy and expression entirely. How does that even happen?