davebarrack
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Grrl Power #1337 - Nothing to 533 here
🕑 Added 2025-03-10 10:00:12 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys are awesome!
Hey look! I figured out a way to do art quicker that didn't involve stick figures! Hah hah, well, I managed to amuse myself, anyway. Don't worry, this gag only runs for two pages. Man, it was so hard to stop myself from putting the eyeball hot-spots in to show that eyes are wet and specular. Not that you'd actually be able to see Scooby-Doo style eyeballs in the dark anyway, but there certainly wouldn't be a light source to cast those hots. Ignore the fact that there are eyelid shadows on the eyes, please.
So, I planned poorly. It's page 1337 and nothing "leet" like hacking or uh, playing video games well or anything like that is on the page. Man, you guys remember when everything was 1337? That lasted like... 4 years? Maybe 6? Memory is weird. Leet-speak felt like an age of its own, and maybe it did last for 12 or 30 years, but its heyday was decidedly shorter than that. And then one day, everyone just kind of stopped transposing letters and numbers. At least publicly. I'm sure most of us have a few "P@$$w0r|)$" with internumerals still. Anyway, memory being weird with time is why everyone goes, "Abwaaaah?" when they learned that (insert movie here) came out 26 years ago! Movies have that special power to kind of live forever in our heads, and unless a particular movie is some sort of childhood keystone, I think everyone feels like every movie they saw after the age of about 16 came out roughly 7 years ago. The Matrix came out 26 years ago! God, you remember how every movie for like 5 years after that had to have a orbiting bullet time camera effect in it?
Maxima respects cops. In theory. We have a saying in America, "Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Unless you're a cop." The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cops don't need to know the law to enforce it. Or... what they think might be the law, I guess. Basically, "a police officer's reasonable mistake of law can provide the individualized suspicion required by the 4th Amendment to justify a traffic stop." Which sounds like a real thin-edge of the wedge ruling to me. But cops in the U.S. receive on average two and a half months of training, and are only required to have a G.E.D. or high school diploma (though this can vary quite a bit from state to state), whereas cops in lots of other countries need a college degree and receive 18-36 months of training. So what was the Supreme Court to do? Suddenly require cops to actually know what they're doing? In America? Get out of here.
So Maxima does theoretically respect cops, but it can be hard to maintain that optimism in the face of a lot of real world realities. Arc-SWAT is a military force with civilian law enforcement duties. She honestly considers her team elites the of law enforcement, and not just because of their powers. Of course, that said, not everyone on Arc-SWAT does have a college degree. Jabberwokky doesn't. Heatwave has 2 years of community college under her belt. I'm... not sure if I ever said where Sydney is in her education. I feel like up until her induction into the team, she was doing like 1-2 community college classes a semester, working on transferable credits, though she had no particular major in mind and wasn't real gung-ho about it. But she had to drop the classes she was taking when she joined the team, because a lot of her non-superhero time is now being taken up with law enforcement and legal education classes.
Comments
Mathew Aaberg
There are tonnes of dangling threads. Thats what makes it a good tapestry. I am still waiting to know why Dabblers had a tail.
Torabi
The Council, presumably. Just items that didn't need to be locked up in the vault.
Uncle Buddha
Re: Sydney's 'edu-ma-cation' - One must wonder whether or not she managed to bring along her spear-gun (from her SCUBA class), and the shenanigans that then ensued??? ;-)
Raymond Dannelly
I suddenly suspect they're normal guys with novelty night vision goggles.
DH
I’m surprised Maxima doesn’t actively glow.
Ampws
By the way just rereading back to when Sydney met the Council for the 1st time and I realised you left a huge plot tag hanging. Did they ever find out who owned the secret attic full of items ever belonged to?
IvyReed
Oh no look out! Dabbler, what was that?! I accidentally spilled invisibility juice all over everybody! ... I can't even see your face and I know you're giving me a look Max Well I heard you drop what sounded like a container of laundry detergent I plea the 5th! You're doing a great job, no harm no foul. buuuuuut, with April first coming up, a joke "stick figure with circles" for one of your pinup releases would be damn funny.
Churchill (formerly TeaBear)
To be fair, Max can't be eaten by a Grue. ;)
JasonAW3
OK, I'm kinda curious. I know we have systems that can detect keywords in telephone calls, systems that can monitor biometric signatures, and systems that can and DO record petabytes of audio data, and AI systems that would alert when something REALLY off crops up with continuous data transmissions, and, surprisingly, these systems and software aren't exactly expensive. Seeing as Halo's choker is in contact with her skin, powered by her body heat, and most probably constantly transmitting keep a location fix on her in case of an emergency, I'm rather surprised that no one has stumbled upon something hinky going on with the Mighty Halo, that is far outside of her normal biometrics, behavior and her generally acting weirder than normal for her. Something like that would, considering her history of suddenly finding herself in the middle of some truly hinky stuff, would be like a Defcon 2 alert, almost immediately. So Dave, I'm kind of wondering, is someone playing a bit fast and loose with the personal security systems of the active agents right now?
Triad Draykin
I got to introduce someone to that just this past weekend. That's when we found out her giggle fits sound eerily like the 'anime girl losing her mind laughing'. Which made everyone laugh harder. Good times.
akrasia
Well of course she can. All that reflected hotness...
Czarzhan
By the way, has anybody else just taken it as read that, despite the assumption of the nocturnes present, Max can totally see in the dark?
Czarzhan
As far as 1337 is concerned, the page *kinda* felt like a text adventure...?
Fogel
So who are the other eyes?
Justaguy
My memory of it is the BBS systems in the late 80s/early 90s. and some MUDs. We were using it mostly to bypass MODs doing simple word searches for moderation.
Torabi
Eyes in the darkness is an amusing drawing time saver, but now you've just got me interested in those other three "nocturnes", particularly the six-eyed "pork scratching" muncher.
Anton Schleef
No, that's when it became popular. It predates the filters, and was used by certain groups online to keep others from figuring out what they were saying. And then there's advanced 1337, which starts to mix in special characters to further muck things up, such as |\/| for an M.
Thomas Dorner
You mean nothing to 335 here, you have to turn your calculator.
Madeleine
You mean there was truth in those Police Academy movies?!
Jacob Bissey
Lol, I didn't notice the page number was 1337 until I read the description. Like, it took me a moment to figure out what the chapter title meant, but after a few seconds it clicked that 533 is leet for see, but I almost never pay attention to the chapter numbers, so I just chuckled a bit a moved on, then when I read the description I was like "oh, that makes a lot more sense now!" And then actually laughed, lol
Justaguy
leet speak was a way of getting around filters originally.
TrixieTurner
Lmao I can see someone saying you’re just a cop and maxima responding with we’re not we’re military just to get hit with the that’s not better. Seeing how nerdy Sydney is I could see her dropping the old classic Brennan line “Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean?”
