Grrl Power #784 – How to lose friends with alien cuisine
I’m not really sure what Sydney’s goal was here. Buuuuut… basically what happened was after spending maybe an hour with NdGT, in Sydney’s mind, she jumped straight from “I know this guy because he’s famous and is now an acquaintance of mine” to “We’re both famous and he’s super interested in hearing about my travels and travails in space, therefore we’re best friends and sometimes friends prank each other.”
If you’re just joining us or forgot what Grakz is, see this page, and this follow up page and the one after that.
TL:DR; basically it’s super hot alien food that’s ten times hotter on the way out.
Neil can handle his heat, but the surprise factor of Grakz probably caught him a little off guard.
I don’t know how Sydney paid for the Grakz, but after all the traffic that dude’s food stand got after those videos went viral, he was probably happy to comp her a to-go container.
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Seriously, what was she expecting?
Has he ever given any hint that he enjoys (extra/ultra) spicy foods in any of his talks toward any of his audience?
A little research would have been good here.
DaveB included a link to the Hot Ones Youtube show in his comments. Assuming that’s aired in Grrlverse at this point in its timeline (and I think it’s a safe bet that Sydney would subscribe to that channel), NdGT blew through a set of ten hot wings that ended up with one coated in (and dabbed with extra) hot sauce rated at 550,000 scoville units (current season’s top sauce is over 3,000,000 . . . they just keep upping their game). He hiccuped once and said it cured his sniffles. So she might have star-powered her sense of how mighty his gut would be, but she probably had some idea he could handle the heat. Maybe not alien, turn-on-your-fart-light level heat, but still, heat.
#turnonyourfartlight needs to start trending now.
Technically the YouTube video in question was posted six years after the events in the comic. Unless Sydney is way behind on her auto registration, which expired in 2011.
Yeah I’m not surprised he unfriended her – also does this mean she worked the guts to hit the return button this time or is there a new one for each time she uses it. That’s probably it.
Undo (Go to previous position)
Undo (Go to previous position)
PS: At least NdGT now has an alien artifact…. an empty food container.
Well… A nearly full food container.
Or did Cora’s crew set her up with a working button?
Curious about this myself. Maybe the last known position activated?
Maybe the Grakz wasn’t the real reason he unfriended her. He may have just realized that Sydney popped over to Fracture Station like it was just around the corner and she didn’t offer to bring him along.
Might be that Sydney figured out how to set it bookmark, and did so once sho got back to Earth.
They set her up with a choice selection of working buttons. But as has already been pointed out, a safe trip to earth may have created a bookmark for where Cora’s ship entered the solar system, or entered earth orbit. Or both.
Best guess is that there really was something not quite right with the previous co-ordinate travel to Earth that caused some… unexpected outcome or was set to unreliable due to some… unexpected event. BUT! Since Sydney just travelled from Earth to Fracture Station, it likely put in a fresh set of uncorupted coordinates into the history.
I wouldn’t be suprised if he didn’t put a hit out on her. I can just imagine the horror and sheer PAIN he would be in for when he sat down on that toilet.
When she leaves from a new location, it’s added to her history log. Leaving straight from Earth to Fracture Station gave her a way straight back to the store. Whatever happened to glitch the one entry didn’t affect the log this time, but honestly it was probably dumb on her part to try this.
So…
Could she transport other people when she goes to other worlds?
Possibly, someone with the power to create stable wormholes that you could drive a truck through.
100% agree. She definitely stopped herself based on not knowing why the destination was glitched out last time it came up. Although, if her previous location (Earth) showed up glitch-free this time, it would be a somewhat safe assumption that whatever happened last time isn’t still in effect. I don’t equate “somewhat safe” to “good idea,” but then I wouldn’t eat Grakz based on pictograms that probably meant eating it wouldn’t kill me, but definitely didn’t mean I’d be entirely happy that it didn’t kill me.
Presumably she had some reason to know that NdGT is no spice wuss (is it 2017 (when that Hot Ones aired) in Grrlverse yet?), buuuuuut . . . there’s a difference between “friendly prank between spice aficionados” and “no-warning exposure to gut-imploding phospor-ass-ent horrorshow”. Dang, Sydney. :-)
I don’t know that we know for certain that the last destination, the one that was glitched out, was Earth. We just know that after that, the orbs were on Earth. We assume Earth, but it could’ve been anywhere.
Earth does seem more plausible in that the orbs were just resting in the ocean for Sydney to find them. But… what if the orbs just searched for a new owner, after the death of their old one, and Sydney just happened to be the nearest person it found who qualified? The orbs then transported themselves to where she’d find them. It’s possible that happened mere moments before she first spotted them.
This would probably be more plausible if the prior orb owner bit it somewhere nearby. Say the owner decided to test out how the shield would stand up to a G-class star?
But we don’t really know exactly how discriminating the orbs are. They could go anywhere from “You have a pulse and you’re breathing” to very specific tastes. “Has ADHD, is this particular point on the autism spectrum, enjoys a dash of pure cap on her food, female of her species, with a mild vision impairment, blonde fur, amber eyes, …”
“Earth does seem more plausible in that the orbs were just resting in the ocean for Sydney to find them. But… what if the orbs just searched for a new owner, after the death of their old one, and Sydney just happened to be the nearest person it found who qualified?”
That was my conjecture.
So, the orbs are able to lock onto a point in space relative to…..? Earth is rotating at a considerable speed arond it’s own axis, and then rotating around its star pretty fast too…that that star is orbiting the centre of its galaxy at an astonishing speed…and that galaxy is not standing still either…. Even for Nth level tech, the orbs would need to have the Size, Location, Velocity, Alignment and Rotation of every single asteroid within it’s reach in its algorythm. If the return button was merely back to earth, a return half an hour later would have her end up several miles off point.
something tells me “even for Nth tech” defines how improbable that tech by definition should be.
I could imagine a civilization that advanced version of a light bulb would be confusing, “what is the power source? How is it illuminating the room? We aren’t detecting any heat, photons, radiation of any kind yet…the room, its as if it just…somehow increases the brightness of every object around it including the air..but that…that makes no sense.”
I would think that the thing that was causing the glitch for the return button was the fact that she was in the future, so the original coordinates would be off by 53 days, putting earth in an entirely different location in the galaxy compared to what the orbs thought. But once she left directly from earth, the coordinates would be fixed.
… this could also be it. In which case, selecting that point probably wouldn’t have been *bad*, as such. It would’ve just been way the heck out in the middle of nowhere, so she’d have needed to go to Fracture Station anyway. In this case, Dave just saved himself from having to draw a galactic background for one panel.
That said, I suspect that Sydney intuited what the artist had in mind, mostly because fictional protagonists tend to be good at that.
Any decent interstellar nav system would account for things like planets and stars moving. Just save the coordinates relative to the nearest major body (planet, moon, or star) and its current orientation, then reapply those saved relative coordinates to the current position when you jump back.
You could of course tweak and override to jump to a different part of the planet, but as a bookmark / default it makes sense to go to the same local place each time, not the same absolute intergalactic coordinates.
About the best stellar cartography that we can imagine so far involves identifying and plotting out pulsars in a geometric relationship. Then, mathematically describe locations in relationship to the pulsar constellation. Bodies such as moons or other planets are too hard to detect and in too much motion to use as reliable navigation buoys. Other bodies such as black holes might also be useful, but pulsars can be uniquely identified (by pulse frequency and wavelength emissions) and mapped across tens of thousands of galaxies. And, they last for billions of years longer than megastars, nebulae, supernovae residue, etc.
I do very much like, however, the idea that the time differential was involved in contaminating the last known Earth coordinate. Unfortunately, if the time differential, by itself, is the cause for corrupting that data point, the effect would also likely propagate to every other previous set point in the ‘browser history’ of the device. In my head canon, I’m going with the time differential plus something else Earth-specific corrupted that save point. Given various activities on Earth with supers, the supernatural, and extra-terrestrial events & interactions, I’m guessing some thing of those or in combination are involved. Plus time displacement.
It might depend on what the nav point has bookmarked. the location of a pulsar, black hole, star or even an asteroid belt is pretty easy to calculate if reference points are available. The galactic drift is not that fast, that two months would matter. A planet, moon or asteroid would be a lot harder…and a space ship would be next to impossible to log onto.
A space station would be as difficult as the anchor point, providing it is in geo-stationary orbit or at one of the Lagrange points of a planet. The Nexus is as easy to pinpoint at the pulsar, since the Nexus is essentially a Dyson Sphere, it has the exact same galactic orbit and drift as the pulsar. A geostationary satelite, such as a tv satelite around Earth, would be as easy or difficult to log as Earth itself. A specific location on a planet or the location of a free moving satelite in orbit of a planet would be a lot harder.
…plus the others seemed OK, so the time factor probably isn’t the issue. Earth being the glitched location is, in fact, speculation. Depending on the glitch, the Orbs could have wound up somewhere other than the intended location. If fact, since the Orbs were not locked to the previous owner, it’s possible that the previous owner never exited the Causeway and a safety mechanism dropped the Orbs on the nearest world with compatible life.
Sooo red… sooo glowy….
A suitable test for Achilles’ invulnerability?
Good news is, it won’t kill him…….
Bad news, it won’t kill him….
This also brings into question … I do wonder how Heatwave handles Grakz? &/or lessor and unworthy heat, such as Carolina Reapers, etc. On the one hand, chemical heat. On the other, heat is heat. And, maybe Heatwave can control the exit pain in ways the Galaxy has yet to imagine.
I mean. “That female creature can shit pure Grakz like it’s water. That’s GOTTA be some kind of superpower or something. Right?”
I also mention this because it hasn’t come up as canon in the comic (yet). But, when you load up on some serious hot in a meal, you WILL feel the burn when you piss. As a warning flag of what you may expect in the near future. The intensity of the pee burn will give you a ballpark of what you should be preparing for.
In a non-canon page, Heatwave did steal Sydney’s lunch, with not apparent I’ll-effects except a hangry Sydney.
*ill.
Link? I don’t recall this, was on Dave’s DA account…?
Don’t have the exact page but it was before the fight at the steak house.
I think that it was a guest-artist page?
He said he drank a vial of “super-Ebola” to “save the world” once, when he and Mr. Amorphous were arguing over whether Achilles should eat his burger after Sydney knocked it out of Achilles’ hand and onto the floor (for saying “mouth feel” one to many times).
Pain sensations are a way of our nervous system warning us of potential danger . . . which makes you wonder if Achilles’ is adjusted by his powers. He evidently has a sense of touch, or “mouth feel” would be irrelevant. But he might not have a sense of “pain” from anything, if it would have to be potentially harmful to set off his pain receptors. Which would mean he wouldn’t really feel a burn from Grakz, or any spicy food, at all.
That makes me wonder if his invulnerability covers mental attacks, and if not, if he could be knocked out of the action by transmitting someone else’s pain sensations to him (similar to Captain Hammer not knowing how to deal with pain, since he’d never felt it before, in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog).
As was explained once before: heat from peppers don’t work on the pain receptors, not sure what they do work on, butt it’s not those
They are a chemical reaction, not a physical one (like touching a hot coal)
This is actually kind of neat: Capsaicin is actually a vanillnoid, in the same family of chemicals as vanillin (as in, the primary flavorant of vanilla), and binds to a receptor called TRPV1 (transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V member 1).
TRPV1 is heat sensitive and plays a direct role in our detection of heat and other ‘this is burning me’ stimuli like acids and abrasions/friction. Capsaicin happens to bind in such a way as to trigger that reaction, causing affected receptors to report that they may, in fact, be on fire or dissolving and can cause the body to react accordingly.
So, no, it doesn’t act on our pain sensors directly, but it acts on our heat sensors in such a way that sufficient saturation can trigger a collateral pain response because the body is being convinced that it might actually be on fire or otherwise under attack in a similar fashion.
Thank you for responding to a half-brained (don’t ask where the remaining half is, that’s a mystery no one has solved) post and explained it better :D
It probably has a good mouth feel.
“Wha-Bump”
And from that time on – Neil’s nickname was “Plasma Butt.”
And everyone said from then on that Niel was a real Grakzhole.
Would he host “Through the Grakzhole”?
Gordon Ramsey would say “Ok, think we’ve finally gone too far. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever said mean to anyone. I’m going to start learning how to paint and put it on TBS.”
Now i want to see a joy of painting with gordon ramsey, but its the Hell’s Kitchen Ramsey not the Master Chef Jr. one. “These trees are F***ing raw!”
I also want to see the companion show, Hell’s Kitchen with Bob Ross*. “There’s no such thing as food poisoning, just happy little accidents for the people who don’t ever have to taste your cuisine again.”
* who’s first career was a military drill sergeant, so he could do the yelling.
Okay, she brought that one on herself.
She could win him back. She just has to invite him on her next trip through the causeway
Off-Topic Topic of the Week:
What colour are Maxima’s areolae?
Copper? Chrome? Rose Gold?
Maxima’s Areola color being Rose Gold is going to be bouncing around in my head all week now, thanks for that.
There IS some Rule 34 of that!
Given human tendencies to nipples darker than the rest of their skin, I’d say bronze.
And now I have to spend the next half hour resisting the urge to be distracted by googling “why are nipples darker than the rest of our skin”. Prolly some evolutionary thing so they’re easier to find for nursing.
You may or may not be aware that the skin on your lips is genetically the exact same kind of skin as your areola? So I would postulate that Max’s areola are the same color as her lips.
Your lips are also basically the same as your butthole. Why invent a new material when the one you have works fine?
And both your lips and butthole are sphincter muscles.
Just more proof that we all came from amoebas. XD
They actually change color during your pregnancy. The darker coloration appears then. Then they revert after a while.
Maybe it’s an evolutionary marker, to show that that womb is already booked, try again later?
I believe the change in colour into a deeper red has something to do with increased blood supply. Same reason why lips turn blue when the blood supply reduces due to hypothermia.
Dave’s Deviant Art page has some pictures of them (while Dabbler twiddles them) but IIRC they were fan made so might not be canon.
I want to see every Member of Archon when they realize that Sydney of all people now has free access to the entire universe, Earth’s only real galactic diplomat, and there is nobody who can stop her.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That thought had more than crossed through my twisted brain! I don’t know who is less ready for that, Earth or the universe.
I want to see Arianna’s reaction when she realises that.
Heck, I want to see Arianna’s reaction when Sydney realises that.
Surprising someone with that kind of effect? That’s nasty…
Where can I get some? Daniel the Human doesn’t mind some spice…
Likewise.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, it is not available in our universe I am sad to say.
But may I suggest Daniel could improvise with some Madame Jeanette peppers in a nice curry with copious amounts of cocos cream/milk and some non-digestible brightly coulored food dye.
eat heartily.
D-man.
There probably is some way to pull it off via some “quantum kitchen” nonsense, not sure anyone has ever TRIED to make something that has a glowing farts bit as a side effect; usually they focus on weird flavors or making your tongue different colors and stuff like that. Although odd “side effects” in some stuff has been reported, but they try to avoid anything that alarms their diners; especially as this junk is expensive novelty food.
So, can she make a aetherium gateway inside an atmosphere? Given that the destination is outside the station in vacuum, that’s pretty impressive. Wasn’t it a fact that Cora WOULDN’T warp out her ship from in the atmosphere because it might be a bad thing, or am I misremembering (quite probable)?
the Aetherium Gateways are kinda presented as the absolute top tier of all transportation technologies in the galaxy. Way nicer than what Cora has on her ship. I’m guessing all that mundane physics stuff is included in the package. She probably doesn’t even need to be outside.
Everyone KNOWS not to Warp when….
in a star’s gravity well (eh… 50,000,000 miles should be ok.)
in a planet’s gravity well (eh… 100,000 miles should be ok.)
in a planet’s atmosphere (shockwave, blastwave, 1500 foot diameter sphere of vacuum.)
on a planet’s surface (1500 foot wide crater. Also see above.)
Sydney almost killed everyone in the neighborhood.
Maybe the guys on Cora’s ship said it would be ok when she showed it off.
That would also explain how she found the ‘Undo’ button.
Given that she’s not Warping, I don’t see how those measures are relevant.
Yeah, technically, she’s folding space by creating a localized wormhole.
And presumably the Causeways are 1-way, like the Stargates in SG1, so opening one doesn’t expose you to vacuum if the other end is in space.
magic Brane Ripper can do it,
Nth level portal tech can do it.
At that level of technology better off just calling it magic. Names have power over perception, tell someone that entity over there is an android created by a civilization that can fold space/time like clay they’ll still think of it by their own frame of reference of “robot, artificial, therefor not real, inferior”, as opposed to just telling them “that entity is a god beyond your comprehension forged into being by primordial beings beyond the restraints of physics”.
Just calling something “technology” has such a mental restraint.
Just calling something “magic” has the exact same mental restraint. The brane ripper, for example: Why did you say it was “magic?” I do not believe that it has ever been called magic in canon, although I’m willing to be proven wrong here. Calling something an “evil artifact” also does not make it “magic,” as artifact does not have the connotation of magical except within certain genres, such as in Dungeons and Dragons where an artifact is essentially a magic item of immense power.
This is true, not sure if the comic established if everything in the vault was magic or not. Sciona used like magic and interfaced it with blood magic, but Vale was able to interface it with clear and obvious technology and used it that way with a location dial rather than blood runes.
magic on the mental restraint is a bigger annoyance for a writer as it is subjective to the reader depending on what series or sub-genre is their go-to. A fan of Slayers may have different mental rules for how magic works when they hear the term as opposed to Harry Potter fans, Marvel fans, Fairy Tail fans, and D&D fans. Some *thankfully* understand magic is one of those things that depends on the author to define and can’t be held according to the rules of their personal favorite fantasy work.
Technology tends to *unless being specifically addressed as magi-tech, or a specific setting’s sci-fi* be held to real world limitations and rules. Also oddly a lot of sci-fi seems to have come to some common ground, based on the then current theoretical physics at least and new up coming innovations, on how their advanced tech works. Why we get so many discussions here about warp drives and wormholes, and such rules.
I do not recall this. Was it done is a way as to firmly establish that is was technology and not magic? Or was it ambiguous?
the portal Deus made. Vale was dialing coordinates into the gate that the Brane Ripper was then slicing open a portal for. It doesn’t establish that the Brane Ripper is tech, only that Vale or someone had figured out a way to control where in space it connected to via technology, and a power plant to power the portal. Whatever nature the Brane Ripper is, it was the key to the device, but the majority of what was going on there was technological in nature.
Sciona had it, but had used blood runes to guide her portal.
The Brane Ripper then was interacting with both magic for Sciona, and machinery for Deus.
So a crowd of people with cameras filmed her outside using her “everyone will fight for this” tech? Way to keep a secret girl.
My thoughts exactly.
I mean, I get that some things can’t be kept secret and have to be declassified.
We don’t know where that line is, and without more context on their discussion, we don’t know if Sydney had crossed it already, but that stunt must have been at the or close to the top of the list of things explicitly not to reveal.
Oh, you are absolutely right! If the capabilities of the truesight orb were classified just because that ability wasn’t obvious and was a great “hole card” for Archon to keep away from public, and potentially enemy, knowledge, then the ability to open an aetherium causeway without having to sacrifice a thousand espers or have a thousand capital ships (nuclear wessel capital ships!) committed to the project is something which should be kept classified on a few orders of magnitude more importantly.
If this doesn’t have future repercussions of a very serious nature after Clara told Sydney that civilizations might easily go to war over the technology that Sydney just casually revealed in front of a few hundred fans all with camera/video capability (not to mention any professional film crews accompanying Tyson!), well then Lucy has some ‘splainin’ to do!
You know, speaking as someone with ADHD combined type, foresight tends to be shit at the best of times. Sidney probably realized once she got there that it was a bit of a bad idea, but figured she was in to deep to pull out.
Cora said she shouldn’t fire the anti-mass drivers in-atmosphere (and yeah, firing antimatter through (even if it’s gaseous) matter might not be the best notion). I don’t recall any mention of not popping in in-atmosphere for reasons of danger. She mentioned not coming in super-close to Sciona’s world because she didn’t like the energy readings she was getting (presumably Mega-Nega-Squidwards give off some detectable bad vibes in various spectra). It’s probably generally considered courteous to show up a decent distance from the surface, too . . . sort of like knocking before just barging in on someone. I mean, you might catch the whole planet watching porn or something.
I’d guess that Atlus and/or Galen made sure she knew what sort of limitations there were on from where she could make an aetherium causeway safely. I’d kind of guess it’s the same as a portal – it’s safe so long as the sides match in terms of atmosphere, atmospheric density, gravity, electrical charge, and so forth.
How would they? How much experience with N Tech do they have?
Exactly. People suggesting that Cora or her crew or Dabbler are in any way qualified to advise Sydney on how to user her orbs are forgetting the Nth tech appears to be essentially mythological. And sure, you can ask a modern day Einstein to speculate on how to wield Thor’s hammer, but don’t expect an accurate answer.
I think they may be thinking of the page where they said they’d tell her about some important celestial landmarks. Her orb seemed to give her some user friendly space maps. But that was the extent of how they could help. No better than someone looking at a computer screen/tablet showing an area map and only having a better idea of what they are looking because the screen while they can’t understand the key or how the tablet/computer works knows the area the map is showing them well enough to guess something.
Dabbler or Cora have probably exchanged some space-currency for local currency, to grab souvenirs and see the sights
More likely Cora or her crew, as Dabbler’s getting paid by Archon.
Dabbler was an adventurer through space and dimensions for centuries. She probably has a lot of different currencies cached away in various places.
I think she was disappointed that she missed her opportunity to make her weapons grade spaghetti sauce on Kelly Rippa. NDT was just an attack of opportunity for her.
Uhm why did someone as smart as him eat it Before putting it through a laboratory first? I mean a microscope at least! Alien. Food!
He probably took one bite, maybe two if he was feeling super adventurous, and conceded that he wasn’t up to finishing the whole thing in one sitting anyway. Sydney claimed it wasn’t all that hot going in, but consider Sydney’s standards for “all that hot”.
(Replying because I realized I should spell this part out.) That means he still has some left to put under a microscope later. As for why he’d eat some before the microscope, because this was a live interview, probably televised, and as an edutainer Neil would understand the importance of spectacle.
Wait, did she spend all day at the comic shop? I thought she was only meant to do wednesday mornings.
With the signing and photos and panel discussion with NdGT she ran late.
Think the original deal was mornings at the comic shop, with Wednesday being all day due to new comic book day.
Dr Frost recommending that Sydney be given some recovery time may be a factor.
The author forgetting the details of his story line may also be a factor.
That lighting though. Damn.
Also, FUCK Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Have you seen his Hot Ones episode? He always seems like a great guy in person, just doesn’t really know how to communicate on social media.
That’s because you have to be a special kind of idiot to be good at communicating on social media
Don’t believe me? just look at the top individuals on any social media platform, that’s why don’t use social media, am the wrong kind of idiot, don’t even have an email account (use to, butt haven’t used it in nearly 10 years)
I’m not sure what your issue is with Tyson, and I’m not sure I care.
He took a lot of heat, and went on the apology tour, after he accurately stated that the statistics for deaths by many other causes exceeded those from the recent mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH.
The fact remains that as thoughtless and insensitive as his tweet was, it was still factually accurate. Stupid, but accurate. But except for the handgun homicides, all the other cases he made are ones where there are already governmental provisions in place to try to ameliorate the impact. Here, we do try to limit the negative on the citizens lives. And while millions of people driving on our roads statistically does mean that some will die every day from accidents, there is a HUGE difference between a car accident and a murderer who deliberately sought out his victims and ended their lives through gun violence.
There is no, zero, less than zero attempt by our government to ameliorate mass shootings. Any attempt to do so is met by a huge and well funded resistance from special interests who do not represent the will of the American public. The vast majority of American’s polled agree that there should be tougher screening for gun buyers, that mental health issues should at least slow down the ability of a person to aquire a firearm, that better background checks would be a smart and good thing, etc. And yet the ATF is limited to paper files and a very limited computer system because of laws passed through funding by special interest groups who would prefer that the government have to spend endless hours digging through boxes of files instead of being able to do a simple computer search.
And this wagging of the dog by the tail is a poison in our politics which needs to be excised.
You can check on Dave’s DeviantArt page, you know?
For the record they appear to be a bright red.
I don’t know what city NdGT calls home, but Sydney’s little prank may have just destroyed their sewer department’s infrastructure. Terrain wastewater treatment facilities just aren’t designed to process Grakz.
Quite possible: I hear that in the Nordic countries, if you routinely eat lutefisk you have to warn your plumber and pay extra for work on your sewage lines.
That’s because of the lye.
The things humans can and can’t let pass through there systems.
Also my friends in Japan know that if the treat me and my friends to Fugu they get a nice Lutefisk Dinner……which is really why they do do it. They prank my newbies….I prank theirs. It’s so musing watching there faces when they tell them exactly what they just ate. But then I also treat them to root beer and mild(for me anyway) salsas and Queso dip. Um not at the same time I’m not that evil.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwkpl121M80
Humans routinely eat things that drop other species in their tracks; Most of our spices are compounds plants are generating to discourage anything from eating them, we use botanical insecticides for stimulants, that sort of thing.
Avocados, nuts, chocolate, caffeine, some artificial sweeteners, grapes, onions… It’s amazing the list of things humans eat that are toxic to many other animals, (Especially dogs and cats… They don’t have much defense against plant toxins because they don’t eat plants much.) We’ve got fairly amazing livers to detoxify this stuff.
It’s actually a bit of a problem in the medical research field, because you can’t directly translate toxicity (Or cancer!) studies in other species to humans.
Yup, that rat-based saccharin study really bit us in the ass. Because of cancer in rats, we replaced a harmless sugar substitute with one that causes brain damage (aspartame) and another that causes metabolic dysfunction (sucralose). Meanwhile everyone who ignored the study and continued to consume saccharin… was totally fine.
I believe that the same thing happened with Cyclomates.
Yep, Tab and Diet Dr Pepper were quite tasty back then when they used cyclamates but went bad when they had to start using substitutes.
Ok somebody explain what part of the church that last panel shows them leaving by because it’s too small a building in my mind.
Most of the churches I’ve been in have an extension away from the stained glass windows where they have Sunday school classes (or whatever their holy day may be.) They normally don’t have a lot of glass, but different places are different.
BLACK SCIENCE MAN BAD, BELIEVE WOMEN.
Halo you’re not supposed to feed alien spicy food to ordinary humans.
So, didn’t want to open a gateway in a dead alien worlds atmosphere in case it caused a problem, yet then happily opened one on Earth right outside? While also telling EVERYONE that she can not only do what was meant to be impossible only for Nth level tech as well as to the general public stuff which likely was meant to be secret.
ADHD plus distractions, plus train of thought, plus not explicitly told not to by an actual authority over her, plus might have forgotten, equals…didn’t think about it; and prank idea so go for it.
As someone who once looked around trying to figure out where I sat my cup down during a conversation while holding said cup, just in my left hand when I usually hold drinks in my right; yeah ADHD plus distractions can equal random dumb actions. Its also kind of like, leave the house, don’t forget to go by the mailbox, keep that in mind, turn radio on, start to think of something; pull into parkinglot at work…hold on did I…damn it.
But yeah, if any aliens saw that outside, add on the situation with the Fel ship and Maxima, Earth has become a serious (Area of Interest).
Yeah, just thousands of issues here… You are bringing up some rather key ones. Let’s see which alien nations decide to go to war to control Nth tech as Cora said to Sydney. Either Cora is wrong or alien governments who have to sacrifice a thousand psychics or dedicate a thousand capital ships to are completely happy with allowing these capabilities to be owned by primitives that they are not even supposed to trade technology with. Yeah…
Hold up, how was Sydney able to get back so quickly this time around?
Did she get tutoring on how the “intuitive” interface worked from Frix or something?
She Did – remember Cora’s team offered to “Set you up with Landmarks” – probably the official docking co-ords of all the major trading ports in the local galaxy.
Personally I’m wondering how she paid for the stuff
Free signings, that’s why it took thirty minutes: twenty-five of it was signing things (and other people)
Sydney should really have started him out with the ring of fire and worked up to gratz. Her rectum has had the lining scortched so often that it was probably worse for ngt. i would rather see the host of the show ngt was on try gratz because it would rectum.
For the most part, capsaicin doesn’t actually cause tissue damage. What it does is directly stimulate pain nerves. It’s essentially liquid pain. To the extent there is any damage, it’s the body’s own “protective” reaction going overboard.
If you eat things with it frequently, you exhaust the capacity of your pain nerves, (But only in the area they’re exposed to it!) to produce neurotransmitters, and they stop responding. Pain nerves have a low duty cycle, they get “tired” easily.
That’s why your capacity to eat really hot foods is just temporary. Lay off them for a while and the pain nerves restock on neurotransmitters, and respond normally.
Does Grakz use capsaicin? Not all spicy foods do, horseradish and peppercorns are spicy using different chemicals. Same general principle applies, though. Pain nerves can only respond so much before they get “tired”.
That was an excellent description of how capsaicin works :) VERY informative!
Seriously, a better gift would have just been to take him with her.
Except that function of the fly orb is almost definitely classified.
Since when has her ability to carry other people in Mr Buble been classified? o_O
No. Her ability to create aetherium causeways is almost definitely classified. Since if it got out, there could be interstellar wars over the orbs.
Better hope Cora and her crew don’t have loose lips when they are drunk
Even if they don’t know what Sydney’s balls can do, there is possibly more than a few who recognize them for what they are
They’re probably decent at keeping secrets :). They still havent told anyone how they have Fel technology without being ‘corrupted’ at least. And they’ve kept secrets from the Alari refugees about what just happened with the Fel vs Archon.
Plus they were planning on keeping the Fel vs Archon result secret from the Xevoarchy, but the space cops are already reporting it in.
Also it’s conjecture to say that ‘there are more than a few who recognize them for what they (the orbs) are.’
What metrics are you using to say that anyone recognizes what the orbs are? None of the aliens watching Sydney eat Grakz seemed to know what the orbs were. One of them thought maybe it was being used to help her eat 3bowls of Grakz, in fact. They have not seen any USE of the orbs in action – especially not making aetherium causeways, which could be evidence of Nth level technology. No one’s even seen just how powerful the shield is, or most of what the yellow comm orb can do (truesight, teleportation).
Yeah, a casual use of the orbs shows them below high tier so far, Archon’s mage department (don’t remember his name off the top of my head, been awhile since he’s been in comic too) said he’d seen several things like them before; and the comments on that page as I recal had conjectured several items like Chakra stones, elemental orbs, spirit orbs, ect… so things that look like them, and also grant the use of super powers exist. Heck, “Hex Bug” AKA Discount Halo has a power with a passing resemblance.
Its only the new ability, the Aetherium Causeway, that has clued in Cora that these orbs aren’t some magical items but Nth level tech. As even for magic, as she said the sacrifice of like a thousand psykers, creating such a type of portal was extremely difficult.
He didnt actually say he had seen several things like them before. He was asked if he had seen anything like them before said he responded by saying that he had some theories about them.
His exact words were “A few (thoughts on what they might be). I’ll need to do some research but in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to consult Dabbler.”
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-99-this-is-how-you-tug-on-maximas-cape/
Also, he asked if they were Chakra stones before he even saw them used to do ANYTHING.
I agree with you about the second paragraph btw, although Cora hasnt actually ever seen Sydney use her force field. :)
While it was off-screen and so open for speculation, it is fairly likely that Sydney used her force field orb in the fight against the street punks on the space station. Putting up the force field is after all not only a standing order from Maxima but just about the smartest thing Sydney could possibly be in the habit of doing in any combat situation. She is the living embodiment of a glass canon, and there’s just about zero actual use for holding any set of two orbs which doesn’t include the force field.
Also, Sydney arrived on the scene of the downed Fel craft using the flight/force field orb combo.
It’s possible. But I try to not make assumptions over things which I have not seen happen in the comic if I can help it. Also, even if Cora did see Sydney use the force field off screen, she is unlikely to have seen how insanely powerful a force field it is, unless those muggers are using planetary-destroying weapons. Which they probably were not doing.
Also we havent seen Cora see Sydney arriving at the downed Fel craft. She was likely preoccupied with what Maxima had done and making sure with her pilot that the Alari did not see any of it happen.
If Bringing back unclassified alien foodstuffs that could cause a bio-hazard would set maxima off. Taking one of the world’s leading scientists offworld via classified means… Not good.
“Unfriended”? You’re lucky he didn’t DIE, lol. Pretty sure most humans can’t survive the nuclear fire that is Sydney’s spicy resistance.
Did we lose the cast page? I was trying to remember the girl with the black hair in the last panel (Olivia, went to the first panels to look it up)
Anyways, the Cast Side panel isn’t showing up, and the Cast Page itself appears to be slightly dorked ()
Cast panel doesn’t show up on the main page, only the archives.
And I just learned that anything with a Greater-than sign gets stripped. My comment contained a comment saying DIV tags show all over the cast page.
So that’s why I lose a link when I try to imbed it under some text in a comment. Greater-than & less-than signs are required in the text-code to imbed it.
You need to use BBC code/html lite to embed a link.
a href=”your link”
etc.
There used to be some examples given on the page when you started the process of making a comment, but somewhere that was lost.
I Wonder if Ariana approved this sit down (unchaperoned, apparently) of Sydney in front of TV cameras?
I’m expecting a colossal ARCHON bollocking for Sydney about non-disclosure and sensitive information coming up next
I have two questions about this page I would like someone to clear up please, if Sydney used a Aetherium Causeway, how did she manage to get back to earth? I thought earth was all glitchy and unwise to travel to by Causeway. Second, why hasn’t Sydney skipped forward a few months again, I thought the Causeway’s caused minor time travel?
For the first question, it seems like a reasonable guess that successfully opening a causeway FROM Earth placed a safe bookmark for Earth in the history tab. For the second…do you remember where you got that idea? I’m not aware of any indication of that, either in the comic or in the Author’s Notes. The fifty-ish days of time travel Sydney experienced was due to Archon disrupting Sciona’s portal-maker and causing it to go haywire.
She probably got a crash course in intergalactic travel from Cora and co.
Also, it was Scionia’s glitched portal that time warped Sydney, not the causeway.
I made a comment to this in ragards to Pander’s comment further down. If the device only logs transits (source and destination) there is No indication the glitch was “Earth” Only that it was the last causeway opened. If the causeway deposited the previous owner somewhere Off-world, they died and then fell (with the orbs) to Earth – then the original target could have been Anything… Anywhere! The Sun? The other side of a black hole!
I really should have read DaveB’s blurb before I posted it btw.
It was Earth. That’s stated in the comic itself, plus why would the last location that the orbs were at be the ONLY location on the history tab that was not showing up?
However, DaveB did say in the above blurb that now that she made an aetherium causeway from Earth to the Fracture, a new Earth icon is on the history tab which is not all staticy and crackling. But this brings up the question of how Sydney would have known that would fix the problem before she made the Aetherium causeway IN EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE (which she had hesitations about before).
Nope. All that was stated in the comic was that Sydney “Thought” it was Earth…. She had no evidence of that. And there was nothing in Dave’s description that I saw either ( just checked) – just cause Sydney “Thinks” it’s Earth cause “That’s where she found the Orbs” – that does no mean it Was Earth. And there was no way to confirm it without trying it.
You’d have to engage in some pretty strenuous mental gymnastics to get me to believe that it’s not Earth. Especially since we do know, for sure, that the scroll bar is the ‘history’ of the places the orbs have been to (and THAT is implicitly confirmed by DaveB). And the LAST place that the orbs were was Earth, until Sydney uncovered them. Something apparently happened, though, during that last jump which caused that history icon to be all static-y. Sydney didn’t only ‘think’ it – she then made the statement in the comic that the reason she was able to guess that was because perhaps the center dots were making her more in tune with how the orbs work (maybe it’s the orb version of an instruction manual).
DaveB was giving some rather hefty hints that the static-y icon was Earth.
You mean, the same ‘strenuous mental gymnastics’ you are using to have us believe SmugD is not in possession of stolen items? o_O
The last place the orbs were on was Dirt, doesn’t mean that that was the last place the Causeway was used
Nah, totally different strenuous mental gymnastics. Honestly, most of my defense of Deus (praise be his name) is not particularly strenuous mentally anyway.
And my mental gymnastics with Deus are based on actual legal definitions, rather than mere conjecture :). Besides, that’s why people hire me. For my creative mental gymnastics based on actual legal definitions.
With the orbs being last used on Earth as a causeway, you have to remember how BIG space is. It was last found on Earth, which means that would have been the last place the causeway COULD have been used unless the owner flew the slow way, through normal space, with all the time that would take. All the evidence points to there being some catastrophic accident during the aetherium causeway to Earth which resulted in the orbs being buried in the ocean floor, off the Florida Keys.
Earth is the last place that the Causeway could have been used before the Orbs transferred to Halo, but that does not automatically lead to it being the last place they were used. The options for travelling between planets are not solely limited to Causeways and slow ways; the previous user could have come to Earth via some other mode of FTL or Wormhole transportation, just as Halo and Deus did for their respective returns from the Fracture.
So did y’all read every one of his lines in his voice or was it just me?
Wait.. DaveB. how did she get BACK to Earth after going back to the Fracture? She cant aetherium causeway back because the symbol for Earth is all staticy and crackling. Thats why she needed to be brought back on Cora’s ship, which took 2 days.
No no – that’s a misdenomer. The “Last Icon” on the transport log (which reasonably could have been earth) was staticy. This does not mean it was Actually earth. For all we know the previous owner warped in front of a super nova – died, then the corpse (with the orbs following it) floated through space for 10,000 years before crash landing on earth during the time of the Effing Dinosaurs! That would cause a glitch or three!
But just now if she Warped FROM earth – then the actual co-ords she warped from are in her transit log !
There was a whole big rationale that Sydney gave, in the comic, about why the staticy icon WAS Earth (since it was the last icon on the ‘history tab’ – and that’s the location to which the Orbs last went. So yes, it WAS actually Earth.
Although I just realized that DaveB gave a reason why she could come back. Apparently JUST that one time was some sort of glitch for Earth, and NOW she has a working Earth icon on her history tab. However, I’m not sure why she would have KNOWN that would happen now, when there was no reason for her to know.
PS – What’s a misdenomer?
A misdenomer would be when you attempt to denomer something, but fail.
I apologize, I’m still trying to figure out what one would be doing when one is denomering something. dénommer is apparently French for ‘to name’ or something like that, but since this is English, I’m not certain that’s relevant.
I’m just trying to figure if wildwinni meant misnomer.
Also, you are very funny, Ed :)
Replied to the main topic in the post above but… If A Misdenomer isn’t mistaking someone for a Gnome by accident. Then what I “thought” it meant was “Repeating assumptions”. In this case just cause Sydney “Thought” it was Earth because that’s where she found the Orbs, does not mean we have Proof it’s Earth.
( And yes I tried looking up Misdenomer but I’m gussing that word is a misdenomer … )
Seriously, what is a misdenomer. That isnt a real word far as I know. :) This is going to bug me until I find out.
I think you mean ‘misnomer’ – a wrong or inaccurate name, designation, or term. Although that would be the wrong word for what you’re saying as well, since you’re saying I have an inaccurate assumption, not an inaccurate name, designation, or term. Maybe you mean misunderstanding? Or mistake? Throw me a bone here :)
Don’t mention ‘Bee-Oh-En-Ee’s around ‘Why-Oh-Are-Pee’, you know how excitable he can get
I prefer to give him Yorpie Snax anyway. It’s better for his teeth and less of a choking hazard.
I suppose misstatement would be a plausible alternative to misdenome.
Also I found an old book “Bad words and Philisophical swears” that uses and defines Misdenomer as specifically “using wrong or incorrect terms to label someone of a [ group of people ] “. As I’ve looking around it was a common term decades ago but has lost usage, and there are books and stuff from back in the 70’s and 80’s using it.
Example – calling Dabbler an Alien is a misdenomer as she is a legal citizen of Earth.
Calling Maxima a Metal Bitch is also a misdenomer, as her skin is organic, and not made of metal.
Etc.
“Misdenomer as specifically using wrong or incorrect terms to label someone of a [ group of people ]”
That’s a misnomer, not misdenomer. But at least I get what you mean now :).
““denomer”
The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.”
I think MAYBE wildwinni meant misnomer. Maybe.
When that happens, just throw it in the misdenomer pile.
Make sure you don’t miss :P
Re: close to celestial object crushed by gravity.
This is not actually correct. If the station is in orbit then it is “falling” through the gravitational field (but because of its orbital velocity it misses and continues onward in a circle).
This situation is indistinguishable from free fall in any other gravitational field UNLESS for some reason there is a large gravitational gradient, in which case the problem would be tidal forces.
The station is built around a pulsar. That is, a celestial object with the mass of a star but maybe not even the volume of a dwarf planet. They have super-high gravity on their surface. Fracture station was built only a few miles above this pulsar, yet Earth-like gravity on its surface.
So, yeah, very large gravitational gradient. That having been said, it’s not an orbit, so much as it’s a built around. Given the answer Sydney was given, I get the feeling that it’s not a problem, but an opportunity: they’re making energy *from* the gravity, such that it’s no longer gravity.
A Fracture is a crack. It’s crack in the fabric of spacetime.
Got it. I forgot that it was built around a pulsar (rather than in orbit). In that case massive crushing gravitational force AND tidal forces should be a problem.
Got it. I forgot that it was built around a pulsar. That would mean massive gravitational fields capable of much crushing AND big tidal forces.
Possibly even capable of forcing random double posts.
That’s just a gravitational lensing effect. There’s really only one post.
+1 1+
The beauty of spherical design: Equal inwards force across the entire surface increases structural integrity.
As long as there isn’t one spot or line at which the force becomes stronger or weaker beyond the sphere’s material-based stability factor divided by the magnitude of force (oversimplified equasion…the real maths is way more involved and my understanding of it would look like Sydney calculating the the flight time to the moon at Mach4), the station should be safe from collapse.
Dabbler: “She did WHAT?!? Inside a PLANETARY GRAVITATIONAL FIELD?!?”
Just another set of side effects the orbs seamlessly take care of. Like how the air pressure inside her shield doesn’t change when she resizes it or how it lets through light and sound but not dangerous amounts.
Further supporting the theory that the seventh orb is the regulating AI.
That would imply that it works without being held, since Sydney doesn’t waste much/any time on orbs that do nothing.
Because you identify the orbs now as “tech” you are mentally forcing tech rules on them regarding portals.
If they were called “magic” you’d ignore those rules just as with the Brane Ripper, or any gate of Hell, portal to limbo, fairy door, ect….
Nth tech should probably be viewed at the same degree at least.
Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishible from magic. Any magic sufficiently codified and understood is indistinguishible from technology.
Indeed,
but speaking as mental associations we all have due to cultural habituation and normalization.
For instance if someone told you that god like being over there was an android created by an ancient civilization with incomprehensible technology; you’d hear “android” and associate with (robots, mechanical, artificial, limited, machinery, circuits, inferior to organic beings, ect…)
however if they told you that god like being is a powerful demon forged into existence by the hands of entities beyond the constraints of physics as we understand them. It has a completely different feel, and you associate less restraints and more respect towards the being in question.
On a similar vein, for some reason the monster becomes less scary when you take it out of the solo hunting your crew down setting and learn its a member of a species and part of a larger ecosystem.
for the orbs I see people talking about wormholes, warp drives, but no one brought this up with the Brane Ripper really. Because the Brane Ripper was described as a magical artifact…despite now being used as part of a machine, and the orbs are now being described as technology.
you hear “technology” and think, machines, rules, limitations, unlike “magic” where the rules are whatever the setting says they are, not bound by the real world. Its just the associations of the terms that become the issue.
Heck something as simple as declaring a celestial being is part of a race of such beings can diminish it in the eyes of some readers, or saying as above the cosmic creator god is a program from a computer (think Star Ocean’s fantasy setting and how fans reacted to End of Time’s matrix revelation), the gods are “just” admin programs…but..they are still gods in the world you were also made in.
Any technology, no matter how advanced, may be indistinguishable from magic if it is sufficiently unfamiliar to the observer.
Heh, I am rather surprised that he did the unfriending, to be honest, as if memory serves right, Real Life NdGT did rather successful in his First We Feast – Hot Ones episode
That was six years after he Grakz’d himself
What do you think why he was able to take the heat during the Hot Ones event? He still remembered the Grakz and found the hotsauce of the show to be nearly bland in comparison
Grakz isn’t all that hot going in according to Sydney, its the exit that is so much worse.
MWA HA HA HA hahaha HE HE HE HE HEHEHE HEHEHE HE HE HE !! Oh EFFING HELL NO!!!!
Maxima: SYDNEY !!!! DO NOT BRING FOOD PRODUCTS BACK TO EARTH UNLESS THEY GO THROUGH QUARANTINE FIRST !!!!
Sydney: Sorry….. ( Not really sorry)
I wouldn’t take a prank that bad from any of my friends.
I would take a spicy food prank in good humor.
With a sheepish admission that turn about is fair play.
And yes, I eat Carolina Reapers and Ghost Peppers.
That last one is easy. Blazars are sport coats that are distinguished from other odd jackets by being made of more formal worsted cloth rather than the woolens most sport coats are made from, usually navy blue or if associated with an organization then in a color or pattern that reflects that association. They also usually have contrasting buttons in metal or shell that may also bear an organizational icon or crest.
I think I may have misinterpreted the question . . .
Just trying to understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I’m getting it right.
Blazers are made out of cloth that was apparently not too bad at one time, but it was formally made worst, before making the blazer. And they sell these at a higher price than regular sports coats?
I feel so confused.
Blazers are your standard “outdoor” suit jacket.
They’re at the same level of dumb as all modern suit patterns, and they don’t let you move your shoulders properly.
(I had to wear one as school)
But they make people who have no shoulders look like they have shoulders.
Bazers (not a sock in the jock) server the same purse for males that bustiers serve for women.
Worsted means the fibers are tightly twisted before they’re spun into yarn. Woolens are made from yarn that’s spun from fibers that have been combed but not pre-twisted. Worsteds can be woven more tightly and tend to have a flatter appearance with more sheen and a softer feel than woolens.
When you think of a generic suit cloth, that’s a worsted, usually serge or other even twill. Woolens are things like tweed or napped fabrics like velvet, flannel, or corduroy.
I’m allergic to wool, so I doubt that would fix it.
Velvet and corduroy are usually made from cotton or silk. A woolen fabric isn’t necessarily made from wool.
From DaveB’s under-the-comic blog: “Neil can handle his heat, but the surprise factor of Grakz probably caught him a little off guard.”
Awww, I’m disappointed that the linked video did NOT include The Unmaker in that lineup of sauces.
What? My link to The Unmaker didn’t make it!
Okay, direct this time:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-118-got-it-in-one/
When thinking about Sci-fi noises I usually stick to “VOORP” it’s sufficiently strange.