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Grrl Power #1366 - Ding dang dong
🕑 Added 2025-06-19 10:00:12 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!
Lapha was indeed a guttersnipe at one point, in case you forgot.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the following before, but it's been years since whatever page that was, and it's relevant to this page, so I claim author's privilege.
Anyway, I have a distinct memory of a scene from an episode of Thundercats where Panthro finds a chunk of gold, not a vein or some scattered dust, but like a beachball sized boulder of the stuff just sitting on the ground, and he says something to the effect of "Stupid gold! So worthless! Bah!" and he kicks it off a cliff.
Okay, first off, I know the Thundercats weren't human, and were generally stronger than Joe Sixpack, but if that boulder was half a cubic meter, it would have weighed about 10 tons. Second, gold is chemically very useful. It's an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and is almost totally chemically inert, and would make a great radiation barrier if cost or weight wasn't a factor. It'd probably also be great to stick in the center of a projectile if you wanted to pack more mass into your shot. A straight-up gold bullet would probably be a bad idea and get jammed up in your barrel immediately, but if it was steel-jacketed, it'd probably be pretty effective.
Even when I was 13 or however old when Thundercats came out, I was like "Geeze, did gold insult Panthro's mother or something?" It was just bad writing. Some sort of ham-fisted out of place anti-consumerist/capitalist message in a cartoon that was, like most other cartoons of its time, 30 minute long commercials for toys. (Huh, I just checked, Thundercats came out in 1985, so I was indeed 13 at the time.)
So it's not that gold doesn't have value in the wider Grrl-verse, it just doesn't have "it's valuable because we say it is" value. The fact that it's rarer than 90% of other elements on the periodic table is a factor, but once mining comets and fracking all the moons around your local gas giants becomes an option, you're still going to wind up with piles of the stuff.
I'm not exactly sure what's going on in the background there with the table and the food. I guess I envisioned some sort of forest trail obstacle course there behind the Archon building, and there's catering? That doesn't seem very military-ish. I don't think the Army usually has a Kraft Services table set up outside the training area, but considering Harem can teleport while holding a plate of ding-dongs or a pan of enchiladas, and there's 5 of her, setting up a picnic buffet table would take her all of 14 seconds if she had the food ready. Actually the table itself would probably exceed her carry limit, as would a cooler full of ice and drinks. She's have to bring bags of ice separately, and maybe one 12-pack at a time. Yeah, she'd have to set up the table before hand, then she could pop the food on as soon as everyone had their backs turned.
Comments
furry
I find the couple to be super cute, and hope they can actually turn over a new leaf and find a happy place on the hero side of things. I think they are actually having way more fun now then they usually ever had, and should feel more secure too, I doubt that their life was all that safe before, creditors, the law, body/bounty hunters, and other criminals can not have been all that fun to actually live with. (edit: dammed enter meaning post..) So long as they get to be part of the excitement and both feel useful and profit from it in some way I feel they have a good thing, and hope they realise it too.
Jon Gibson
If harem's teleport limit is mass based then she can likely teleport around 65kg per body. Her own mass takes up most of that of course, but that still means one singular mega harem can teleport 260kg extra mass.
Damian
The difference between copper and gold is mild enough that the golds workability more than wins out on the usefulness in electronics. The real thing that people'd like to figure out how to use more in electronics, probably, is silver. That's amazingly conductive, but actually pretty hard to work with.
Magraal
Sunken lead potentially? Lead that has sat at the bottom of the ocean for a century or two is super valuable in physics experiments because it emits virtually NO radiation (and we're talking on a microscopic scale, that would throw off the most sensitive readings). Really not sure what use that would be to advanced extra-terrestials but the fact is that it's not something you could just 'produce' artificially, I don't think.
Playwars
Wait, hold on, this begs the question, what were the ingots that Deus used to trade on Fracture station ? He had a bag full of them on page 679. Clearly the galactics valued that stuff. They looked metallic too.
Anton Schleef
In, mild, defense of that episode of Thundercats, we didn't start regularly using gold in electronics as a superior electrical conductor until after that episode, if I'm remembering my electronics development history correctly. At the very least it wasn't considered a 'well known' fact about gold until the late 80s early 90s. Thus, at the time they wrote that episode gold was only valuable for the fact that it's chemically neutral, but lacks a multitude of other properties that would make it even as useful (much less more useful) than glass for chemistry work. Heck, even today glass is, most of the time, more valuable and useful for chemistry than gold is, as it's stronger and transparent while being almost identically chemically neutral, so it's really only because of being one of the best conductors for circuitry and that it 'looks pretty' that it has any value to speak of. Otherwise, today, it'd be less valuable than copper (which, if I'm remembering correctly, is a superior heat conductor and a nearly equal electrical conductor while also being significantly stronger and lighter).
