Grrl Power #957 – Dabbler has a cunning dot plan
This is why I suddenly had to start doing the specular pass on Maxima, otherwise the choker would look like it actually added shininess to her. Max isn’t, or I should say wasn’t, medium-brown haired before the whole gold-plated phase. Dabbler just took a best guess. That will get sorted out later, but if Max got to choose her hair color (which, she actually can now) she’d probably go for black hair. It isn’t that she has anything against blondes, certainly. At least not natural blondes, and not even women who bleach their hair now and then, but if pressed, she might have some opinions about women who go ultra-bottle blonde. It’s not so much an aesthetic complaint as it is a concern with the behavior of many women who go that route.
Yeah, Dabbler probably should have predicted that, but it was kind of a last minute gift idea. Dabbler called Cora while she was out taking the mercs to wherever she did, and she swung by Spacener’s Gifts or Hot Topic. They have those in space, for fledgling space goths and people who need whoopee cushions that work in hard vacuum.
Personally I think being a goth in space would be a bad idea. If I worked in space, I’d probably wear day-glo with those reflective stripes joggers have, just in case I got spaced. Obviously I’d have one of those hard vacuum whoopee cushions with me as well I could use as an air supply. I’m just saying, wearing all black in space could have its disadvantages. And yes, in case you were wondering, I did recently catch up on The Expanse.
On a tangential note, I don’t usually pay a whole lot of attention to costuming in TV shows, but damn, if I was Shohreh Aghdashloo (the woman who plays Avasarala in The Expanse and also the mother of every Indian character in every other TV show) I would have had it in my contract that I get to keep my outfits from that show. Her and Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal are well fucking dressed.
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So, am I the only old phart who’s going to laugh at the idea of Dabbler’s dot-plan?
If Dabbler had a dot-plan, then anybody could finger her. Which, don’t get me wrong, I think she’d like.
But it would give people her real name, which I don’t think probably is easy to spell in human alphabets, as well as her login name and what terminal she was logged in on, which might be problematic since people putting together an attack might want to know, and tell people her schedule, phone number and so on, which – well, which I guess would make it easier to get together with people on the plus side, but not really just the people you want to get together with, which makes it problematic…..
And at about this point she looks up and says, “That’s stupid. Let me teach you, in great detail, what fingering ought to be….”
Fairly sure that at all times Dabbler has her eye on the login notifications. Literally…
Dabbler: “Hold one, I’m going to finger a friend…”
Sydney: “Ewwwww”
Dabbler: “What? It’s nothing dirty… for once.”
Sydney: “How in the world could that not be something dirty?”
Dabbler: *an hour of exhaustive computing explanation with occasional chime in by Leon*
Sydney: …yes… but you *meant* for it to be misconstrued as something dirty, didn’t you?”
Dabbler: Always.
Of course Dabbles has a Finger Server in her… whatever, just to find her friend’s 20. (It’s all in Wikipedia, “Finger protocol”.
I worked for a startup ISP in the early 90s, which used linux computers exclusively because no MS licensing fees. There were a whole host of jokes about fingering your coworkers… And plenty of other geeky fun as well. As a pretty staid, conservative (not politically, but socially (I’m a bit introverted) and regarding my own personal attire, jewelry, etc) guy this job taught me a lot about interfacing with people with purple hair, mohawks, and multiple piercings.
I play on this thing called a MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination). Basically it’s like a role playing online game that’s text only. Anyway, one aspect of it is each player has a tag on their character called a finger, which gives a short summary of stuff about the player’s character (age, nickname, superhero name, maybe a quote or a website on the game’s wiki, etc). And to see this information of other characters, you type in +finger .
:)
er you type in +finger (that person’s name)
I have never seen Dabble in profile before, I know she was pretty straight on. But she is adorable in profile.
Maxima’s face in the 5th/6th panel was so disappointed that my heart just went out to the poor lass. I hope this works.
Panel 5 is the most adorable I have ever seen her and I want to buy her a house now.
Bah, meant Dabbler, but completely agree with you, as well, Shawnarc.
Dabbler throwing shade at Maxima? Why am I not surprised?
Dabbler in the last frame is cute….which is not a look she gets often, if at all (I can’t recall any time).
And it’s nice to see Maxima looking a bit like the young adult she was before going gold.
Am i the only one who is paranoid to draw any fictional magical seal work?
I’m positivly CERTAIN that i will be the one unlucky ass who will make one up, draw it and crack reality with it just happenning to be the first word of a spell in some universal language that means “The End”
The thing about that is why do you think the fictional magical seal is any more likely to be the trigger than, say, the muppet show theme song?
Or for that matter, that “The End” isn’t already in progress, since we invoked it in 1945 with the first Nuclear Explosion, conveniently located on (and desecrating) land sacred to the Mescalero Apache tribe? Or since Hitler and his black-magic Nazi people invoked it by the Ritual sacrifice of tens of thousands of helpless people? Or that it didn’t start with one of the Great Old Ones crashing to earth in Roswell New Mexico? Or ….
I mean, seriously, life’s too short to worry about whether you’re causing the end of the world. Most likely somebody else will end it for you. If it was really just up to you, you’d have to stop burning fossil fuels or something.
This is what we call the muppet show! *insert gonzo exploding*
If it was possible to end reality we would have done it already. Humans are stupid like that.
Ahem…
It’s the Muppet Show with our Very Special Guest Star, …
It’s time to play the music
It’s time to light the lights
It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight.
It’s time to put on makeup
It’s time to dress up right
It’s time to raise the curtain on the Muppet Show tonight.
Why do we always come here
I guess we’ll never know
It’s like a kind of torture
To have to watch the show
And now let’s get things started
Why don’t you get things started
It’s time to get things started
On the most sensational inspirational celebrational Muppetational
This is what we call the Muppet Show!
(Gonzo blows his trumpet)
“It’s time to light the incense.
It’s time to slay the sheep.
It’s time to wake the muppets
From a million years of sleep.
It’s time to raze existence
It’s time to banish light
It’s time to call the Void in
On the Muppet Show tonight!
OK, Bear, that surely is the most perfect spell to end creation as we know it!!!!
(Chtulhu voice) Why did you have to wake us?
(Ithaqua voice) I guess you’ll never know!
(C)’cause now I’ll have to EAT you!
(Ith) And coat the world in snow!
Bravo! I couldn’t think of the next stanza. I’m glad someone could.
I’ve encountered the thoughtform before, of ‘Something I am doing could call down the Apocalypse.’
[Over-Sharing Mode]
I dated someone once who thought the progression from ‘Missionary style’ to ‘Get thee behind me’ was to be taken extemeley seriously as invoking supernatural powers. The stopover in the middle at ladies-on-top had also been traumatic as that was reputed to be how Lilith fell and got ejected from God’s Plan.
One would think however that someone who thought those things wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic about participating. :-/ I suppose it was about the adrenaline rush?
One would also think that if someone had these thoughts going through her mind that she should have mentioned them a lot sooner than she did. :-(
It ended unhappily, and I spent quite some time not dating anyone overtly religous after that.
[/Over-Sharing]
And that was the first time I asked the question, ‘why would that be any more likely to be the trigger…..’
It’s time to summon Hastur!
Audience: Why don’t you summon Hastur!
It’s time to summon Hastur
On the most heretical
Necronomical
Apocalyptical
Lovecraftypical
This. Is. What. We. Call
The Hastur Shoooooooow
(Gabriel blows the Final Trumpet)
THIS is why I love this comment section. We’re all weird.
Sadly Gabriel would need to explode.
Why not do it before someone else does?
Frankly if you’re doing magic circles, you’d have to randomly get a whole bunch of extremely specific bits 100% correct for it to do anything, AND even if you did randomly guess a perfectly functional circle, one has to intentionally will magic into it for it to activate. So long as you don’t know how to do that, you should be safe (assuming some folk or another get’s their hands on it, doesn’t know what it does, but decides it’s a good idea to find out the hard way).
Seriously, a proper, functional magic circle requires so much precise rune-, sigil-, and glyph-work to do much of anything that even if you were basing it off of a legit lexicon of symbology if you don’t know at least the syntax the odds of you getting anything functional are incredibly slim. I should know, I was part of a team that was testing every single possible combination (a task that we *really* should have known was basically impossible, even given a literally infinite amount of time in which to complete largely due to tedium and boredom), and while we gave up after a number of combinations somewhere in the octuple digits, only around a three hundred circles actually did anything, and we only managed to identify 6 new circles that had never been recorded (at least, not recorded anywhere any of us ever had access, and at least one of us had unrestricted access to the akashic records). It should be noted that there are several hundred billion recorded magic circles with actual effect, with that number growing a little bit every day as new spells are encoded into circle form, as well as new shortcuts being identified allowing one to condense existing spells with fewer glyphs and runes enabling greater modularity.
TLDR, the odds of a layperson randomly guessing an actually functional magic circle with zero knowledge of how they work and what sort of components comprises them are so infinitesimally slim that it’s already a statistical impossibility, and beyond that that whatever circle was randomly drawn happens to be one that’s actually dangerous is bordering on actually impossible. Additionally the chance of a layperson unknowingly activating *ANY* magic circle is literally zero. You’re safe.
Signed,
One of they guys whose job it is to fix the universe every time some idiot breaks it
It depends.
You’re talking about circles glyphs etc as a technical component that works more or less by itself.
Simple magic circles aren’t as powerful as highly featured ones, but most humans don’t have the mindpower to charge all those fiddly bits and keep their relationship(s) in mind anyway.
So, when you get a magic user who uses a simple circle as a focus mechanism, it works just fine.
Signed
A guy who does tech support for much more minor stuff
I mean, yes and no. At the most simple level, literally just a circle can be a “magic circle” if you activate it like one, but all it would do is either effectively trap ambient magic that flows into it or stop most magic from getting in at all, depending on what you intended to do (with the former occurring if no intention was applied when activated), and it would remain active until it was overloaded, and how long that would take would depend on both the material and the focus of the caster.
For casting an actual *spell*, circles follow the same basic formula as nearly any other form of casting, power times will plus intention times specificity equals effect (this is a gross oversimplification as English largely lacks the vocabulary for the operations performed, so I substituted mathematical operations that were closest conceptually), meaning from a technical standpoint *no* external fiddly-bits are needed (yes fiddly-bits is a technical term for those of you wondering, and yes it has as slightly different meaning without the hyphen as OMG THE HORROR used it above), but *most* spells are either too complex or too specific for *most* casters to perform without something to aid the process. Incantations and gestures are common, as are complex rituals and foci, but in my considerable experience it’s hard to beat a good old fashioned magic circle, as, yes if you are attempting to cast on the fly you can get plenty of work out of pretty much whatever scribbles you draw in the circle (to an extent, above a certain level of complexity you *need* at least *some* of the framework unless you are a sufficiently skilled caster to not require fiddly-bits at all in the first place), but that still requires you to *actually* visualize within a reasonable degree of accuracy what you want to happen, which is very taxing and taking the time to draw a circle in the heat of the moment could get you killed depending on the situation so you are generally better off using gestures or incants to begin with. Unless, you’re talking about personalized circles, which can be prep’d in advance and largely only use symbology with meaning only to you, which are not unheard of but not particularly common in my experience as they are generally fairly inefficient compared to things like incantations. They work, and I have seen them utilized to devastating effect, but I wouldn’t recommend that method to basically anyone assuming I wanted them to be successful.
Proper complex circles that utilize the universal lexicon can be activated by anyone assuming they have a sufficient amount of power to jumpstart the process, and depending on how it’s written the amount of required power from the caster can be cut down drastically. And yes, if you have a truly properly drawn circle literally anyone with sufficient power can activate it regardless of whether or not they know what it’s supposed to do or are visualizing anything, even if they picture something totally different it will still do what it was drawn to do, because all the visualization and specificity are baked into the formula, hence why they are extremely particular about every last minute detail. This is both why people who *can* draw a proper circle are absurdly rare these days, as well as why we are extremely valuable. If you give me a night to prepare I could outfit an army with enough firepower to wipe out at least six realms before they need more circles (obviously, I’m not going to do that… again), but it would take me at least a few decades to teach someone else a sufficient amount of the lexicon and syntax to be able to make circles above a basic level. Granted if someone already worked with glyph-work as their primary fiddly-bit the process of training them on circles would probably be much, much shorter.
Signed,
A guy who wishes the text boxes here were larger so it was easier to proof read
PS, I apologize if the tone seems to shift in a few places, I went off on many tangents, and a few times went back to add new tangents where I thought they fit best with varying degrees of success. I hope this came out coherently.
Just so you don’t feel like your efforts were in vain, you should know that I love both of your comments, thank you for pitching in lol <3
Like most things I do, I do them entirely for myself, so long as I am happy with the result that’s ultimately all that matters. I appreciate the extra validation, but never worry about whether or not my efforts are in vain, because nothing I do is in vain, if it made you happy, that’s awesome and I’m happy it did and thank you for telling me, but ultimately that’s basically a happy accident.
Signed,
Some guy who’s having a great time and is ecstatic that you are too
Depends, official underpants of the apocalypse.
Nah… the power is in the Intent and visualisation, not in the scribbles themselves. And then you still need to “add power” for things to putatively work.
It’s one of the very few things that all the various magical traditions across the world/ages actually agree on.
A paperback from the 1980s or so was about mysterious and suspiciously intense fires that
were started…magically?…whenever a particular 20-30 digit number (without zeroes) was written in any form.
A digitized photo…. the x,y,z/pitch-tilt-yaw of a motorized special effects camera…. the embroidery machine at the T Shirt shop.
Anything.
So… magic accidents are not quite statistically impossible.
*Insert reference to “The Laundry” novel series by Charles Stross. Quiller meets Cthulu. Genius.
More like the 9 billion names of God, by Clarke.
https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
That’s no dumber than believing in magical invisible universe-makers and sex-police. Which is not necessarily a kind thing to say.
It’s not necessarily a sensible thing to say either.
What other kind of universe makers are there supposed to be, in your mind?
Quantum. The idea that things can’t happen without intention is, not to put too fine a point on it, infantile and unsupported by observation. The universe just is. It doesn’t mean anything. Meanings are assigned, interpreted, after the fact things. Snowflakes are as they are as a consequence of physical properties, not invisible magic pixies who like hexagons.
That’s… not how quantum theory works. In fact, that’s the opposite of how quantum theory works.
The closest thing intention gets to quantum theory is the Observer Effect which states that our mere act of observation may skew the results.
Now, Quantum Theory is full of instances where we don’t know which state a particle is in, which leads into the famous Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which tells us what we might be incapable of knowing at any given point in time, but it is not the state of the particle which is both positive and negative until the variables are collapsed, it is our knowledge of that state which is uncertain until it is observed.
It is simply that the ‘outside force’ being applied in some cases appears to be coming from some very unusual directions (for certain definitions of the word ‘direction’, as it appears to not follow time/space as we do, so the motion is not simply non-euclidean, but something altogether different from what we can predict), which we’re still trying to figure out.
Yes
Honestly, looking at the world as it stands, who can say that ending it to make way for another try would be such a bad thing? I think the cats and raccoons will do brilliantly, given a turn
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” – Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
We-e-elllll, now that you ask…
You obviously know of the “What can (possibly) go wrong?” prohibition, yes?
There also exists a prohibition on stating “Nah, the world won’t end if…”
I wouldn’t be concerned because, and I say this knowing full well it will likely be an unpopular opinion: magic doesn’t exist. Other than the slight of hand, smoke and mirrors type practiced by stage magicians, it’s nothing more than a macguffin for fictional stories and an idea that wistful people hold in their head to make it through the day.
If there were magic, there’d be literal gods walking the earth, unabashedly bandying those powers for all to see – but there aren’t. If the force of magic were real, humans wouldn’t have spent eons perfecting weaponcraft – they’d simply hurl ice, fire, and various plagues at each other like we do bullets in the modern world. As Bear suggested, the end would have already come, and probably several times.
But, no, the only gods that exist are the self-assigned ones who either have so much power, money or fame that they believe themselves godly, only to be taken down by a bullet, arrest warrent or hot take on social media, and the only disasters we’ve seen are those wrought by nature or our own technological foolishness.
So draw your little circles, funny squiggles and non-euclydian lines – the only thing you have a chance of hurting is your own psyche, and, well, there are doctors and pills for that. ;)
carefull if go with black hair on maxima or she may look like elisa maza from gargoyals xD
I fail to see the problem – she’s an awesome character, we’ve already got
DeusXanatos, and the entire show is great.Only if Dabbler illusions herself as Demona. I will proceed to have a coronary, thank you.
You missed the opportunity for HOTH TOPIC the coolest store in a Galaxy far far away!
There’s one in every Darth Mall.
I’m not going to send a ninja hit team out for that one because it was particularly good.
They’ve got a day off. You’ll find them in the Dagger Bar?
Ah, that’s what happened to all of the Bothans.
I was trying to figure out what that pattern on Maxima’s face and neck was, kind of thinking maybe Dave added something to her look, and then it hit me – those are the reflections of the light fixtures above them! I didn’t realize JUST how shiny she was indoors until now.
… I think that’s an advanced pentagram, an inverted advanced pentagram, followed by a ritual seal?
Next panel: all the programming nerds have a codegasm.
I really like the idea that the only thing that is more powerful a driving force then Dabblers libido is her desire for puzzle solving research.
Its when she is using her mind to solve a puzzle that the coolest Dabbler appears (like when she was trying to examine Sydney’s orbs, or when she was trying to figure out where the teleporter went)
You just don’t notice it normally, hidden under the porn side ….
Getting past the Guardian of Primness into the best defended panties in known space is therefore a double win. LASO, to borrow a Halo term.
The way krona is looking at The orb’s!
First i thought she was looking at sydney/ leon, but now im convinced that she is obssesed by the “promise of power”
What you have seen, you cannot unsee. So yeah Krona is going to be permanently curious about the orbs.
If anyone’s curious this is what Maxima looked like before the transformation.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-414-the-o-g-s-origin-of-the-gold-stuff/
I do love me some coding technobable.
Max might well end up looking like a supermodel, but an ordinary supermodel. LOL
Women’s Professional Basketball…. Or Volleyball.
Too well rounded for either of those.
I kinda hope that Maxima ends up having a very slightly glitchy shader, which is perfect UNLESS someone looks at her from EXACTLY the right angle, under the right conditions.
Blonde Maxima is Sidney’s Big Sister. Lets Go! Maximum MaxSid!
Seconded.
Also, maybe she’ll be less hesitant to join the weekly game at the shop.
Maybe if it’s a Lord of the Rings-centric role playing game? :)
I mean, we’ve already got her confession to being a D&D nerd.
“Ioun Stones?” ^_^
“You! Say that with pride!”
True true. :)
I admittedly don’t know that much about D&D, so I didnt realize Ioun stones are D&D instead of Lord of the Rings – most of my Role playing experience is from White Wolf or Champions.
Haven’t played Champions, but I am an ooooooooooooooooooooold WoD nerd. ^_^’
Still have my all my V:tM, W:tO, and M:tA characters, including Sorcerers, Ghouls, and exactly one Risen.
I have pretty much every V:tM and M:tA book, most W:tA books, a dozen or so Changeling books, a few Wraith: The Oblivion books (including The Risen), all the Year of the Hunter books, all the secondary super books like Mummy and the second Mummy book, and the Demon: the Fallen ‘book.’ Also have a LOT of the campaign books, including every single one with Samuel Haight, all the ‘By Night’ books, all the Wyrm books, the two Weaver books, the Kindred of the East book, the Book of Nod, and all the ‘end’ books for the older series (Gehenna, Apocalypse, Acsension, and Time of Judgment. I didnt bother getting any books after that though.
I’m pretty sure my WoD books collectively cost significantly more than my car.
They are D&D, but only derivatively. They’re originally from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series. (Yes, they nicked a lot of the magic rules from Dying Earth for D&D.)
Dying Earth is incredibly worth reading, it is a fantasy classic on a level with Lord of the Rings.
I am not actually a super fan of Vancian spellcasting.
What does Vancian spellcasting mean?
It’s the concept that spells effectively act like ammunition: the caster can only hold so many in readiness, they have to ‘load’ in advance from a reference source, and once a spell is used it’s gone until they can ‘reload’.
Implementations vary significantly. For instance, some let a ‘loaded’ spell be used as many times as there are ‘shots’ available (as long as you loaded Fireball today and have a spare shot, that shot can be a Fireball), while some require the user to load each ‘shot’ individually (if you think you’ll need three Fireballs today, you better make sure to load three). And while some give the user exactly as many loading slots as they have using slots, others mismatch those numbers – either to strongly limit repertoire but allow repeated uses within it, or to allow a wider repertoire of options that cannot be fully utilised.
Speaking of specularity…
I think you need to tone it down on the non-shinies. Kenya especially has been very plastic-looking lately. Remember that specularity isn’t necessarily shininess- it combines with roughness in a lot of ways.
I think doing some more heavy-duty blending between the highlights and lowlights (there should only be a TINY spot of either, with the majority being in-between) will give you some good skin-tone results.
DayGlo Goth *IS* a thing, remember :) Though don’t know the actual name for the look, but do know it falls under Goth :)
Ghost Rider had a DayGlo outfit for a while in the mid-90’s
Checkov’s gun has been introduced. I’ ready to see it go off.
Please name an instance where the gun was introduced then not used.
One of the Discworld books probably.
I read that, about 50 years ago!!!
I’ve read all of the Discworld books, I think you had that wrong!
That is where a skilled editor is your friend. If Sir Terry left a gun (wand?) unfired it was probably part of a gag. An unfired .50 Checkov is just sloppy writing. Even in my own non-fiction writing I had to go through and check for hanging tangents. This one has lots of potential. I’m just looking forward to seeing where Dave goes with it.
A friend of mine wrote a screenplay where a gun was introduced on a wall, and used a dozen ways but never fired.
Some one loaded it and put it back.
Someone used it as a paperweight.
Someone later used it to crack nuts.
A secret message was left in the barrel.
etc
Aw. Max seems so hopeful, and then so disappointed. It’s easy to forget that she spent her formative years getting used to always being a center of attention, standing out in any crowd. That must have been a lot to get used to. I get the feeling it’s something that’s always bothered her, but she shrugged it off because there wasn’t an alternative. Now there is, and it’s bringing some emotion.
The Expanse is honestly one of the best sci-fi shows I’ve ever watched, next to Stargate SG-1.
Plus it’s probably the most ‘hard science’ fiction of all scifi shows as well, on a Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
Space Odyssey 2001 is almost completely McGuffin free. Only the AI is beyond current tech capability, and if you assert that HAL only seems intelligent then Google can already do better for a disembodied voice.
The hibernation system is also a bit beyond our current tech, and the long-term viability of the orbital habitat designs depends on which designer you talk to. Of course, there’s also the various areas where our universe ran faster than Clarke anticipated.
Quite right, I forgot they used cold-sleep. Age is catching up with me.
You do have remarkably good taste.
How do you rate Galaxy Quest, as regards science fiction films?
If you mean the Star Trek knock-off with Sigrid Thornton it’s not SF, it’s satirical space opera. Excellent.
I liked the movie. It’s not hard science fiction, but it was a fun movie. :)
I especially liked Guy in it, because he was SO genre savvy about how he felt he was doomed because he was just ‘Crewman #5’ and I liked how in the end he became a named character, ensuring his survival in the series after he survived the real life adventure. :)
RTX off
I feel like a little makeup would do just as well to get rid of the shine… but I guess it wouldn’t be quite as handy or instant
In story we have been told that it doesn’t stick well.
Specifically, Max discussed her past attempts with various forms of makeup with an Archon photographer.
If they want to make her shinyness seam less unusual, I’d make her darker skinned. The darkness by it’s nature would reduce some of the gloss, plus some Indian and really dark Malaysian types have that gloss finish naturally!
HEY! PLEASE CAN YOU MAKE MAXIMA’S CHAMO-FORM A DARK AMAZONESS ???? PLEASE!
No, make her all sparkly vampire.
Please, I am suffering from a dicky tummy as is, kindly don’t make things worse!
Dogs are just built like that. The boys all have dicky tummies.
“AMAZONESS ???? “
It’s the female version of the standard male amazon.
Just be one of the several varieties of goth who mix in brighter colors! It’s quite simple. /joking but only mostly
Leon must be a god level programmer. Dabbler the genius goes to make a team for this, and despite having herself, Cora, and Krona, who has the universe’s command console at her fingertips, she also wants Leon. Maybe she’s let him play around with alien tech before? I already figured he was in the top 0.1% of earth programmers given his occupation, but this is still a nice surprise, go Leon!
Pretty good reasoning. Do however factor in that this is a social event and that Dabbler is a succubus. If nothing else it would be simply rude to exclude a professional programmer, even if he was not in the same league as them. Nobody likes being excluded from a team being picked, in front of all their friends!
That said though, I think you have called it pretty well. No one has gotten a key position at Archon without showing exceptional skills. Arianna, for example, has responsibilities which range over what would normally be covered by somewhere between three and five different departments! Lawyer, Public Relations and Human Resources, just to name the big three. The fact that she can also order black ops teams to conduct operations shows just how exceptional her role is!
Heck even the janitor has to cope with muddy boot prints on the ceiling! Let alone all the other weird things, such as coping with the aftermath of a Dabbler recharging session.
Programming?
More like 50 or so sliders as seen in Photoshop and game character builders.
Why are people saying that ‘flesh-coloured’ Maxi is lacking shiny eyes? They look fairly normal in panels seven and eight, the same as they do in panels one and two
I love a scene where the nerds get to power flex some programming skills. Can’t wait to see this one play out!
Yikes take it off before you just start casting all over the place. Also is it just me or are dabbler’s lips fuller as of recently.
Her lips are fuller and softer, her skin more silky, her hair fuller, her … ahem …
well every part is literally hypnotic, so don’t stare for too long!
Just be glad she only has one pair of Hypno-boobs now.
Otherwise no one in that room would have a cognizant thought.
All I can hear is Robert Downey Jr/tony Stark “We’re back in hardware mode” from Iron Man 2. please pardon the paraphrasing, it has been a while since I last saw it.
I have to say, I enjoy this story and have been reading for a while. But it feels like there is no effort put into making anvil look like a person. Her face goes changes so much between panels and often looks like a man at times. I would try not to judge too harsh, but it feels like one of the 2 black women, and the one in more story lines, just doesn’t get the love other characters do.
Again, I do love the story, that bit just always nags at me.
Good Point. Anvil is my favorite, as she is an AMAZON and not caucasion, as I am Biracial, myself! (THO I prefer, multiethic) Cacasion and American Indian, Iroquois, in fact!
I am a bit confused why she is calling for Leon here?
Krona knows her way around light manipulation, part of her “hack reality” powers.
Cora knows her way around it as well, literally wearing it after all.
I am not sure what Leon can add? Knowledge of how Cameras work?
not cameras. monitors. this is a display we are talking about. Leon probably knows his way around a shader or two. if not, knows where he can get good code examples. (legit or not). do not reinvent the wheel. good engineers steal mercilessly. that’s why the mechanism reference books cost so much.
Leon is a tech genius, and he knows more about what he’s doing than Kronachrome does
I get her calling over the others, but what’s Leon’s expertise in this particular area? I know he’s the tech guy, but this is supposed to be magic.
I’d Bet Leon has coded his share of Blender addons.
He’s also been dating Krona for a few months.
So, do all technical discussions of arcane actions, rituals and processes happen in the Comments sections of webcomics? Just thinking that it’s a great way to obfuscate the content, but still have it be searchable (to some extent), browsable and annotated. You’d just have to know who the PLAYERS were…
Why is Maxima’s face full of cracks *before* putting the device on?
Reflections of the lights fixtures and skylights.
Can we take a moment to appreciate how amazing Dabbler’s hair is in this comic? It’s not often I think of hair as sexy in and of itself, but this is one of those instances.
Wow! It’s so surreal seeing present-day Max look nearly like a normal human!